


In Which Cronus Ampora, in the 61st Sweep of the Era of Benevolent Rationality, Embarks on a New Career

by RainofLittleFishes



Series: The Era of Benevolent Rationality [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternian medical technology, Assault, BellCurveBent, Cronus grows up, Dubious Consent, Era of Benevolent Rationality, Families of Choice, Gen, Grubs, Hemospectrum Shift, Original Character(s), Other, Oviparous Trolls, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Pregnancy, Quadrant Confusion, This is a ridiculous premise and also there is an OOC tag, Troll Crafts, Troll Culture, Troll Government in Any Incarnation is Entirely Too Involved in its Citizens' Reproductive Processes, also bridges - bridges are totally a troll Thing, from each by ability to each by need, hand-waved sciencification, ooc, the torrid love lives of librarians - shh, wrigglers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-30
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-11 00:16:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 23,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2045694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the 61st Sweep of the Era of Jade and Teal Benevolent Rationality, Cronus, unable to qualify for most jobs by virtue (or stain) of his blood, takes a slot as a reproductive brooder. Kankri is a reproductive technician, assigned to the position by virtue of his unthreatening physical stature and calm demeanor, among other qualifications. Cronus is more lost than he knows. Kankri can’t say no to a troll in need. Welcome to BellCurveBent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You’re nervous. It’s not like you have reason to be nervous, right? The position comes with room and board, no more couch surfing and fastgrub meals or cans pinched out of your always-dwindling-too-fast paychits. Not that you have any paychits left. You could have retreated to the ocean but you don’t have a hive to go to, without a lusus the darkness gives you the heebie jeebies, and the only days you’ve spent underwater were counted off waiting for something to loom up and eat you.

Your new dorm room is closer to the clinic, but you needed company last day, even company that doesn’t much care for you, so you’ve walked from Porrim’s. You’re a Violet, you may be irrationally prone to fits of violence, but you’re sturdy and hard to hurt, you shouldn’t be nervous, right? (You haven’t had a tantrum since you were 3 sweeps and they took you from your first caregiver, but the IDgraft on your hand says you’re dangerous, so it must be true.)

Your name is Cronus Ampora Maryam. You’re 10 sweeps old, a sweep and a few perigees past your adult molt. You lost your waste-hauling job to a plucky Green and two drones and were let go because your services were no longer needed. You’d feel bad for the plucky Green who needs two drones to help him do your job (not your job, not anymore), but he’s got someone to look out for him (someone who got him your job) and you’ve only got yourself.

*

The room is bright, and smells of sharp antiseptics, with a very, very faint undertang of slurry. The reproduction technician is tiny. His eyes are still mostly wiggler gray, with small spots of probably rust. His horns are tiny and unthreatening. He introduces himself as Kankri Maryam. It’s a generic name, like yours, all unclaimed wriggler cullees are Maryams. You wonder why he doesn’t have a hatch name, even a generic one like yours.

He looks you in your eyes and shakes your hand like he isn’t afraid and you decide you like him. It’s a leap of faith, but you literally have no one else to trust, and he’s about to wreck you in a professional manner. His hand is tiny and warm, claws filed professionally to the quick, handshake solid. Your hands are even colder than usual, and your fins are clamped so tightly back they ache.

The window to change your mind is rapidly closing. There are contract violation fines you wouldn’t be able pay, and some informal loans you already can’t, so really, it’s not much of a choice.

For the past perigee, you’ve applied to every City or University sanitation job that was publically posted and have been found wanting for them all. It would have at least saved you time if they had posted that Violets need not apply. You’re so tired of being told no when it took every bit of courage you had to try just one more time. The state is always looking for brooders. In this at least, you have not been refused.

You chat a little, you don’t remember about what. He asks you some further questions about your medihistory, if you live with someone or have moved to the dorms. He asks you if you read the instructional book and brooder contract. You did. (The important part is that room, board, and medical is covered as long as you’re brooding. Each live grub hatched pays off in an additional 6-8 perigees room and board, with possible extra compensation for certain unlisted desirable phenotypical expressions. You don’t want to be homeless. You’re sick of being hungry. You’re tired of being needy and unwelcome.) He goes over a few of the provisions with you and asks if you’re sure you want to do this. You have to swallow a few times in order to get out a half-whispered yes.

The contract was submitted a week ago from your system-provided palmtop. This was the second appointment it spit back. The first was two nights ago and a dispassionate Jade had measured, probed, tested, and sampled you in every way you could think of and a few you didn’t want to dwell on. You had passed.

He asks you if you have questions. You don’t know. You shake your head. Your fins had perked up a bit at his kindness, they flatten again. Should you have questions? Your photophores, always at least slightly contracted, tighten to pinpricks, as they try in vain to go unnoticed and uneaten.

He asks you if you mind if he goes over the whole procedure before you begin. It can take a few hours. He says most people are nervous their first time. He asks if you have a moirail to stay with you. You shake your head. He asks if he can touch you if it looks like you need comfort, he says it’s nothing to be ashamed of. You nod. You’re pathetically grateful.

He says that he’ll be following your case through until you lay, but that if you’re ever uncomfortable with him you can request another tech from him or from the system. He scans your IDgraft, lays out a series of items on the counter, tells you to visit the facilities and leaves for a few minutes. You void your bladder, strip and climb into the thin gown, and wish it was over. It hasn’t even begun.

*

You don’t really want to think about the procedure. Kankri’s voice is soft as he talks you through the whole thing a second time, as it happens. Your legs and arms are strapped down, hips not quite overextended. He apologizes but says that it’s the required standard for first time state contracts. You can’t move much, but you turn your head toward him and close your eyes, try to pretend it isn’t happening. His voice is steady, soothing, a better distraction than tugging at the IV line of sedatives and saline for the pinch of the shifting needleworm.

During the parts where he isn’t working on you (after the mandatory slurry donation, after the Tyrian has come and gone, while you have no choice but to endure the fullness for over an hour, table cranked back up to cradle your hips) he takes his gloves off and holds your hand, like he isn’t afraid you’ll crush his fine bones. You wonder how many people leave here with a hopeless pale crush on him.

You doze a bit as the sedatives win out, uncomfortable but unable to shift much. His soft breathing is just faintly raspy, enough to know you’re not alone as you drift. He wakes you up with a soft apology so you’re not surprised when he cranks the table back down, eases out the plug and lets you drain back into a pan. He tells you to tense and relax to help it drain, it will make the next step go more easily. The pan is drained down the biohazard sink and softly clatters into the sterilization bin.

You know what comes next but your throat still shivers with atavistic horror as he opens the cabinet and pulls out a pale translucent nookworm. Its blind head rolls at the light. A high thin fear trill escapes and he patiently waits for you to compose yourself before he introduces it. It shouldn’t bother you considering you signed up for packing your gut with grubs, but it’s somehow worse than the Tyrian, who was impersonal and awkward but at least already over.

The nookworm’s smaller than her bulge. It ambles about cleaning up any stray bits of tyrian, visiting each of your newly opened vacuolombs. It muscles its head past your seedflap, into your genetic depository, and you can feel it swallowing as it drains it.

Another whine slips from your traitorous throat. Kankri asks if you’re in pain. You shake your head, eyes squeezed shut. It doesn’t technically hurt, not even your stretched seedflap or the points that her bulge stung and snipped into. You still want it out. He says that if he takes it out now, it would still have to go back in to finish. “Do you think you can last a little longer?” You nod. Twice would be worse. He coaxes the bloated, now tyrian, nookworm out as soon as it starts a second sweep of its new territory. He asks if you need a break. You nod.

He disposes of the worm, takes off his gloves, and undoes the straps. You pull your legs up on the table, huddle like a wriggler. Your arm with the IV is on top. He asks if can touch you. You nod but don’t look at him. You know you signed up for this. You’re still disgusted with yourself. He cards his fingers through your hair and lets you huddle until your body starts to unclench.

“I’m sorry,” you say, “you probably have another appointment to get to.”

“It’s okay,” he assures you. “The first time is the worst, we have the room for the rest of the night if we need it. You’re doing very well.”

His hand moves down from your hair to your neck.

“Is this alright,” he asks. You nod and push back into it just a bit. He scuffs you and you stiffen and relax, involuntary, but grateful. His warm hand, stronger than you expected, becomes the only point of importance as you check out from the discomfort of your body. You’ve been scuffed before by cullers, you’ve even been asked and agreed to it a few times, but he is the first one that’s made you feel safe. You only met him tonight, and you are still uncomfortable, but there is a breakwater solid weight of knowledge in your being that if anything comes through the door at you while you are under, he’ll take it out with extreme prejudice.

When your wriggler fit is done, you put your legs and arms back in place. He sets up the counter again, scans a double handful of vials into the system, and locks you back into the table. The hydrapipette is next. He washes his hands, re-gloves and gently guides each of the nine thin glassine heads up your nook. You can feel each of them lock onto a vacuolumb, not the sharp sting, numbed pinch, and squiggle of the tyrian, or the hungry pull of the worm, but a dull double pinch as the heads each settle straddling a newly revealed valve. He snaps two vials into the neck of each head, the double hiss of pressure release followed by a slow trickle. You count off the attachments. A few minutes pass. He asks how the pressure feels, are you full? Any pain? You shake your head to both. He swaps out some vials and tells you to tell him if that changes. Finally he taps the thin necks one at a time, and pulls them free, the heads disconnecting to act as plugs.

He disposes of the now limp pipette, shucks his gloves, unlocks you and this time you feel little embarrassment about curling up for him to rub your back and pet your head. You’ve been accused in the past (not very far in the past) of being aggressively forward, needlessly needy. You’ve literally done nothing but lay back and take it for the past two hours but feel too tired to feel guilty as he comforts you. You fall asleep and don’t notice when he removes the IV and updates your IDchit.

*

It’s just a few hours to dawn when you wake up under a blanket, Kankri still there. He helps you back into your clothes, lines your underwear with a pad. Your muscles feel weak and watery. You smell like fear sweat and stress. He’s a surprisingly muscular warmth under your arm, taking more of your weight then he ought, patiently steering you the three blocks and two flights of stairs back to your new third floor dorm efficiency. He checks the mix and the temperature, strips you efficiently, and gets you settled in your new ‘coon.

That last thing you remember as your eyes close is his silhouette in the light of the fridge. You don’t have much. The manual was pretty stern about nutrition but you don’t get a paychit until after the fertilization. You hope he won’t frown at you.

*

You wake up after sunset, hungry and less exhausted. The fridge is still empty but the counter almost teems. A few boxes of Vitamin Enriched Shake’N’Slake (just add water!), brooding supplements, a tall almost opaque jar of hellbeastfish oil, a half dozen pull-tab cans of fatty mobfish, a paychit, a mealchit banded in a pattern you haven’t seen before, and a note from Kankri:

“Message me tonight when you feel up to company. We’ll discuss what to expect next, the nutrition section of the book, how to use your mealchit, and any questions you may have.”

His details follow:

Kankri Maryam  
Reproductive Research and Development Office  
Reproductive Technician & Coordinator, Practical Applications Practice Department  
CoextensiveGeneticist

You still feel a bit numb but there’s not much to be embarrassed about after what’s already happened. He’s seen you at your most vulnerable. It’s not a romance, but he’s not going to hurt you.

You take a shower and the water is both too hot and too cold. You set you head away from the fatty mobfish (cheap, delicious, almost filling, but they also keep for sweeps, and you need to hold something in reserve in case something goes wrong). You make yourself a Shake’N’Slake, down it, and message him.


	2. Chapter 2

Kankri shows up in jeans and a sweater and you didn’t know that you could want to pile him more than you already did.

He greets you with a sort of grave happiness and stops just inside the door to pull out a rolled weightworm, flicking it open and tapping it flat on the floor to recalibrate before use. He crosses to the kitchen and unloads something onto the counter.

In just another moment, you’re curled back on the couch in your heavy state-issued blanket, opercula firmly clamped shut, side pressed to him. He doesn’t seem to mind how much you want body contact, or that you’re more comfortable if you can avoid directly meeting his eyes. He just pauses to check with you as he lectures. His voice is steady and earnest.

You’d like to close your eyes and just listen to its rise and fall, but that would be rude. You don’t want to offend him. He’d probably still treat you courteously but there’d be more distance. You don’t have anyone else you could lean on and the possibility of disappointing him is a lurking storm cloud of horror.

“Please forgive me if this gets repetitive. I know that you read the manual, but it can be difficult to absorb in one reading.

“The initial procedure has induced changes in your body beyond that of fertilization. Your body chemistry will be readjusting. You may feel changes to your moods, like you’re not quite in as much control as you usually are. This is normal and to be expected. It is why it is very important to even the mellowest of trolls to either have an available moirail or to have someone that they can allow to act as one.

“I am here for you as long as you are comfortable with me in such a capacity, and there are other trolls available should you become uncomfortable with me. Can you promise to contact me if you need me?”

You nod.

“There’s an easy requesting function on the contract page if you ever want, or need, to request a different tech or monitor. You don’t have to go through me. Can you promise to use it if you need to?”

You hesitate, but nod. He resumes.

“In the first perigee you may feel like your temperature is never quite right. You will likely get aches, possibly all over. This first set of changes may start within the next few nights, if they have not already?”

This part is a question. You nod, look at him.

“S’cold. Maybe a headache,” you say and shrug. You figure the ache in your nook is too obvious to mention.

“That’s normal enough. Last night was very stressful for you. Drink plenty of fluids, that may help, and there’s a few medications that would be safe to take if you need them. I’ll push you the journaling app to your palmtop. If you can track any changes we can establish a baseline and stay on top of any potential problems?”

“Okay.”

“Let me know if you need to take something for the pain. There’s some restrictions to what you should take while brooding, but no one should have to suffer if it can be avoided.”

You nod and push your head into him a bit. You are shameless and he is generous. You can’t help but take advantage. He brushes your hair back and continues.

“The Reproductive Research and Development Office has as of yet been unable to reproduce the effects of a Tyrian… as frustrating as the Jade Consortium might find it.” This is almost an aside and you wonder what he is thinking about that it makes him sigh so.

“As the manual details, a Tyrian is necessary for the first time for the best results: a Tyrian’s bulge and tendrils can open vacuolombs with greater accuracy, higher success rate, and lower complication rate than any current form of mechanically-assisted cutting device or bioengineered organism.”

You shudder at the word complication. And even the embarrassment of being stuffed by the casual Tyrian was better than more worms.

“In addition, tyrian slurry is unique in that it speeds the healing of the newly opened valves and prepares the vacuolombs for implantation. It is possible for two or more concupiscent partners to conceive a grub without tyrian assistance, but it is unlikely that there will be more than one, two in a few cases. Above that, one or more grubs are likely to go unhatched, or die shortly after hatching. So there’s some element beyond the physical, perhaps some trace element for development, or something that assists the vacuolombs to better nourish the developing grubs. Or some handwaving Church of Life influence."

He wiggles his fingers at edge of your field of vision and you grin.

“Keep in mind that while the effect does wear off over a decasweep or two, and clutch size declines with time since tyrian intervention, if you take one or more partners in the future, you are likely to conceive. The effect lasts longer with cooler hues.”

He doesn’t say how long it lasts on Violets. The manual estimated 20-30 sweeps for Blues, but 100 or more for Indigos. That’s pushing into the Empire era before this kind of program was officially tracked. For all you know, as a Violet, you are now permanently viable. This was written as an addendum to your contract in the section entitled “Individual-Specific Information and Warnings to the Potential Contractor” along with the advisory that violet brooding usually lasts a full sweep, broods can run up to a dozen, and a note on your weight. You vaguely remember that he had gone over all of these last night, one final chance to back out that you couldn’t afford to take.

You pull your knees a little closer. You don’t think you ever want to have sex. He keeps brushing at your hair. You push closer and he touches a horn, stops for a moment when you shudder. You nudge at him again and he rubs the base and continues.

“So a tyrian contribution is necessary for at least the first time, but one of the side effects of tyrian-induced clutches in conjunction with multiple donors is a higher likelihood of nausea and mood swings in the first perigee.

“Your body has been introduced to quite a bit of strange life codes. The tyrian influence is preventing it from outright rejecting them all. Then the early eggs will be setting up shop in your vacuolombs and your body will be hunting for resources to feed them.”

He pauses.

“You’re in good condition but underweight by half a ‘stone, not enough to be rejected or waitlisted from the program, but enough to flag your file for extra food credits and monitoring. We’ll discuss nutrition. Use the weightworm once a night. The results will transmit to your file with me. I’ll let you know if there’s any concern.”

It wasn’t a question but you nod.

“Forgive me for stating it, but you should eat when you’re hungry.”

You roll your eyes. He can’t have seen it but somehow he knows.

“Perhaps you think that too obvious to mention, but there are those who have needed the reminder.”

There’s a sighing descent to his tone and you surprise yourself with a huff of almost laughter. For the first time, you think about how he got to be so experienced, all the other brooders he must have guided, must still be visiting between when you’re scheduled to see him. You know better than to be jealous that his attention is split. It’s enough that he is here now, and will be here again, and his attention is entirely on you and he acts like there’s no rush to be anywhere else. He is touching you. You can’t remember when someone last voluntarily touched you.

“It’s also important to both your health and that of the grubs to maintain exercise in addition to diet. Your file indicated that your job had kept you fit but that you a currently unencumbered.” (That’s the nicest way you’ve heard it put. Porrim said she wasn’t surprised that you were shitcanned like the trash you hauled. It’s okay, you told yourself, incubating will solve your problems. One state clutch to pay for the Tyrian’s work, then you can go independent, or find something else. You don’t want to be institutionally culled as an adult for highblood rage. You just needed to breathe and not yell back. You just need to not get yourself locked away until you shred yourself.)

You’re breathing fast enough to shake him. Kankri has stopped talking. You look up, try to tell him to just keep going. He seems to understand, his hand goes back to your head, you find yourself slumped down enough to rest your head entirely on his shoulder, horn tips circling around behind his neck. He doesn’t seem the least concerned. Your neck twinges to let you know that it is a bad position to hold for too long, but you are no stranger to bad decisions.

“Do you have any ideas how to keep yourself moving now?”

You wonder if he means more than just physically. You feel trapped, but not by him.

Trapped in your body, always wrong, soon to be worse. Trapped in your head, too scared to venture far enough to find anyone who might more than tolerate you.

Before you lost your job, your closest acquaintance since you left the cullerium was your trundlebeetlebeast driver, a broken-horned rust of indeterminate age whose clearly fake IDchit proclaimed her to be “Agatha”, no hatch sign or culling-sponsor. She swore like a sailor, smoked like an antique steamship, and drove like a taxipropellerwasp, terrorizing pedestrians and traffinculcators alike, yet she never maimed anyone, including you.

You couldn’t understand a word she said. You have no idea if she understood anything you said or just went through her route until you caught on. You know nothing else about her. You wonder how she’s taking to plucky Green and his two drone assistants. You hope she doesn’t break her unmaiming streak.

“Cronus?”

You try to shake your head. Somewhere along the way you didn’t know what to say to him and so you mostly don’t. He doesn’t seem to mind. You are such a wriggler.

“We’ll think about that later. Do you think you can eat something?”

You consult your treacherous belly region.

“Think so, but haven’t gone shopping yet.”

“That’s alright. I brought a few things and part of your allotment from the central dorm store. And you can always go to the cafeteria here if you don’t feel up to cooking. You mealchit covers four full meals a night but keep in mind that it logs anything you purchase. This is an advantage in monitoring caloric intake and nutritional diversity, but if you get items on the low to no nutritional list, it will automatically deduct them from your stipend, so go heavy on the protein and foliage, preferably in multiple colors of both. A fortified Sh’lake or set of vitamins once a night will help balance it out. An extra measure of fish oil in whatever it goes with will help for both calories and some nutrients. You’ll want to make up some weight before the grubs start pulling on your resources too much.”

You’re distracted trying to remember the last time you had fishbone crisps because you wanted to and had the chits. You can remember the salt and crunch vividly but can’t remember in which would-be-culler’s hive you stood when you had them. You wonder which side of the budget they land on. Bones are full of calcium, right?

Two nights ago Porrim tossed you some stale CarbPowCrunch when one of her friends finished your last two cans of mobfish. The chips made your weird seadweller stomach churn and you haven’t had anything but water and the IV drip since.

You should have just walked to the Subsiderists outpost or the closest Church of Death but you didn’t feel up to being seen by other trolls. The proteintubes always go first and the grainflavors are just as bad as the chips. You remember this all too well from your five sweeps in and out of the cullerium and a series of disappointed would-be-cullers.

Porrim was a friend-of-a-friend of one of your would-be cullers. She doesn’t like you. She doesn’t dislike you. She just seems to endure you. You try not to impose.

Kankri seems to catch on that you’re at capacity for the moment.

“Why don’t I start something for lunch and you familiarize yourself with the tracking apps?”

“Thanks,” you manage.

He makes soup and you eat together on the couch and discuss the nutrition section of the book. You’ve never had a working heat element before and have no idea what to do with it. Three bowls in, you confess this and he pats your knee.

“I was lucky to come under the tutelage of a capable cook,” he shares. “I’d be happy to get you started. Why don’t you look through the nutrition section for something that interests you and next time we’ll go shopping and make it together?”

You nod.

When he gets up to go, you don’t want him to leave. You start to get up and have a moment of vertigo. You sit. Your gills pull like they’re trying to breath. You realize that you vascular system is uncommonly attached to him already. Your body is just trying not to drown in it the only way it knows how.

He pauses at the door.

“Cronus.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll be by every other night for the next perigee to check on you, and after that according to what you need. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or experience any pain, or even if you just need company or to talk. I’ve forwarded my details to your palmtop, as well as those of someone who can answer any questions you may have about the incubation or laying process from your side of things. Her name is Jesara, she works in the Central Library. She’s on dayshift, so she’s usually free most nights. If you aren’t comfortable asking me, at least ask her. Can you do that?”

“Sure thing, Chief.”

He closes the door behind him and you’re both disappointed and relieved.


	3. Chapter 3

You like Kankri, but right now you wonder why. Clearly you are a terrible judge of people.

Jesara is a huge Indigo.

You had figured that things will get worse before they get better and you’d need whatever advice you could get, so you messaged her the next night to arrange a convenient time before you could wriggler out. She called you back promptly and you’re halfway across the city before you have time for second thoughts. Her voice was deep and calm. You could imagine trusting the owner of such a voice.

The exercise lifts your spirits and works out some of the aches. You present yourself at the central library and a curly horned Brown in dusty scorched robes cheerfully escorts you into the depths of the basement.

The lighting is poor but the ceilings are high and hallways wide. The Brown keeps up a patter of friendly tour guide trivia and has no problem clearing all the corners, though you have to back up one time when he turns to you abruptly to point out something dusty and evidently fascinating in an ill-lit alcove.

Finally, he knocks at a door, opens it, waves at someone inside, waves you in, and, presumably, bounce-strides off again. You’re pretty sure you can’t get back out of the labyrinth by yourself.

So. Jesara is huge and an Indigo and a part of you is just a wide-eyed wriggler thinking, PLEASE don’t step on me. It’s not chucklevoodos, it’s just, you’re an adult, you might eventually get a few more inches of height and horn, a ‘stone or more of muscle, but she’s easily twice as wide, half again as tall, at least two and half to three times your mass. You’re not sure if that makes the idea of her carrying a clutch bizarre because it’s hard to think of an Indigo as vulnerable, or logical, because who’d mess with that?

She’s sitting in a high-backed floral-patterned chair and waves you to the nearby couch. Her horns are huge, twisting up and back, crossing in the back before pointed back up again. They clear the chair back by a thin margin. She wears them like a crown, and her neck is lined with the muscle necessary to support them. Her back is straight, and if she’s carrying now, you can’t tell.

The couch back is stacked with blankets in a spectrum of blood colors, but no blood scent. There’s a miniature purrbeast asleep in a chair. The block smells like old datagrubs, clean clothes, something spicy, and an odd scent of age that you later learn is old books.

“Good evening, Mr. Ampora. I am Jesara Ineera. It is lovely to meet you. Would you care for some tea?”

You sit. You have no idea if you’d care for tea but you figure it’s best to play along.

She pours you a cup and you study her. She’s painted but not like any cultist or adherent you’ve seen. Her face is a few shades of gray paler than her skin, her eyes accented dark in contrast to appear larger, indigo irises light by contrast, her brows painted on with faint brush strokes that make her look somewhere between amused and surprised. Her lips are painted small, a gray darker than her face but still lighter than her skin. The overall effect is muted, and surprisingly unthreatening, like a ghost that watches the living like it’s the afterlife version of nighttime teledramas.

She hands you the cup in a small dish and you study it instead. The vessal is thin, brittle and unlike plasteel, slightly translucent. You tap a claw against it curiously and it lets out a dull chime. She lets out a low laugh.

“It may be best to let it cool a bit. But I do love the smell of the steam. You have questions. How should you like to begin? How are you feeling? Fever, aches, any swelling? Mood swings?”

Not counting the recent medinquest, you’ve never been asked such intimate questions by a stranger. You duck your head and risk a sip of tea to delay.

“Mood swings induced by a tiny technician that you just want to pap?”

You choke and almost drop the steaming cup into your lap.

“It’s alright, dearie. It’s perfectly natural to feel that way about him. It’s one of the reasons why Kankri was assigned where he is. And you may have to share him, but you can be assured that he won’t say anything he doesn’t believe or do anything he doesn’t want to do. He is eminently earnest and trustworthy and can’t abandon anyone once he takes them on. It’s his greatest asset and worse flaw.”

You’re not sure how to respond.

“Well, if you don’t want to chat, I can fill up the silence… I have an awful lot of history about which to be excited and a new audience that hasn’t heard it all before…”

“I’d like that actually,” you surprise yourself, but it’s true, even if it conveniently also prevents you from having to answer any questions.

“Very well…”

*

The Central Library is across the city from your dormstem. You are merely supremely efficient when you log it into your tracking and calendar app and venture out on the nights Kankri isn’t scheduled to come by. You need the exercise. Sometimes you see Kankri coming or going in the library main level or on the way to see Jesara. The first few times you force yourself not to trail after him after you greet one another. After that, you don’t have to try quite so hard. Jesara becomes another safe spot, a harbor for you to aim for when you cross the unfamiliar parts of the city.

*

Your huge greenblood neighbor two doors down knocks on you door one night while Kankri’s in. Kankri looks to you where you’re on the couch with a plate of your latest culinary foray, and you’re not sure what he’s asking, but he invites him in.

Greens have a reputation for being pretty laidback, at least compared to many castes, but Beneah Wapoth, age 28 sweeps, is built like your old trundlebeetlebeast, striated with scars like a striped hoofbeast, and wouldn’t be out of place leading a charge in the Summoner’s Revolution.

They exchange a few words at the door. Kankri cracks a soft joke you don’t catch and Beneah throws back his head and roars with laughter. A tiny squirrelkin lusus darts down the outside of Beneah’s tunic and up the couch. Its tiny paw on your knee is very troll-like, its tiny ears pointed down. It looks like it’s pouting. You hold out your plate and it politely takes a roasted searoach and nibbles. Beneah commandeers a chair (your only chair, the apartment isn’t that big) and straddles it. His face is seamed with scars and sun damage. His downward facing horns are almost comically akin to his lusus’s ears a moment past. Kankri closes the door and joins you on the couch.

“Never have I seen a Violet so close before,” your neighbor drawls.

You have no idea what to say and can’t help but look at Kankri.

“I’ve never heard a Green to approach anything from the side when they can poke it from the front,” Kankri deadpans back. It’s not true, there are plenty of Green ninjaficators, or so popular media would have you think, but that’s not the point.

Beneah grins.

“So,” he continues, “the westward train is down for maintenance and I find myself with a night of freedom and no plans. Yes?”

It isn’t really a question. But you nod to show you’re paying attention.

“A free night and nothing to do but get to know the neighbors, catch up on city gossip, correct the grievous damage my darling vocation has done to my poor claws… A harsh mistress, my beloved!” He leans forward, like he’s entrusting you with a confession. “A harsher Mister, should my moirail find me bar crawling instead!”

Now you all laugh. Yours is partially relief, but not all. He doesn’t seem quite so scary.

“We will get to know one another now, yes?”

Beneah rustles through the pockets of his tunic and coat and pulls out several sets of files, an intimidating trimmer, a half dozen assorted tiny bottles of claw lacquer, and a bag of nuts.

The lusus snags a ‘roach under each arm and shuffles back, overburdened, to nest in one of Beneah’s front pockets and keep an eye on the proceedings.

Both your visitors stay several hours. You’re surprised at how much fun you have, even if you don’t know any of the people they discuss and have no opinions to share of city politics.

Beneah tells you that your spots are quite complimentary to the shade of gray lacquer you choose.

You hadn’t realized that you were glowing.

*

You stay too late one night and Jesara offers you the couch while she works her dayshift, but you’re not tired yet. You’re still not quite sure you understand how you ended up in the datagrub conservation lab downloading, uploading, reloading, and wiping up frightened datagrub waste. You didn’t know that the older ones could vomit too. You’re absolutely positive they’re aiming at you.

“It takes a delicate touch,” the chatty Jade intern tells you. “You’re doing great! My first day, I squished two and crippled a third. I thought I was going to be demoted to dust chasing, but the Conservationist just sighed and cryo’d them for manual data transfer. The Conservationist is on sabbatical for the next three perigees at a dig site, so this gets farmed out to the interns like us.”

You don’t tell her you’re not an intern. You still have no idea what her name is. You wonder if the Conservationist knows Chatty Jade is, at this very moment, wrist deep in a shufflebox of extremely expensive pre-BR hybrid catagrubs while she is instead looking at you.

Her hands are deft as she moves the datagrubs now. You are uncharitably relieved that she practiced on datagrubs instead of troll grubs.

“Your claws are beautiful, by the way. Where do you get them done?”

*

Jesara has frequent visitors during the nights you visit and she calmly introduces them all. You nod, or say, “Hello”, and they politely don’t stare, don’t exclude you, don’t expect an answer. You don’t feel unwelcome.

There are multiple flavors of tea. You didn’t know that leaves came in flavors other than poisonous, not poisonous, reluctantly edible, expensive, and the misbegotten offspring of one and two, itchy. Evidently there are nuances to this.

Then there’s the night when you enter and there’s already two trolls and a flurry of fabric across the tables and floor. Jesara is stitching her slim sharp needle into the hoop of cloth on her lap, a not infrequent accompaniment to your visits. She seats you beside her and the room continues to fill with trolls from across the spectrums of blood, vocation, and hatching era.

There’s a friendly Rust a sweep younger than you, a Green built like Beneah with wide square hands, a quiet Teal you never catch speaking, a Violet so old she almost rattles when she walks, and still the room fills. Every few trolls, there’s someone with a platter or bowl or pitcher in addition to their bag. Some are passed around and some are set on a far table and visited.

The purrbeast makes a nuisance of itself and is thoroughly cossetted.

They chat, and sip, and snack, and cut, and stitch. The cloth is a range of weights and colors and patterns and textures, materials both Alternian and imported. There are bolts of it, and boxes of precisely sliced geometric shapes, and a few baskets of scraps showcasing spots of blood, hatch signs, ship emblems, clearly once clothing and uniforms.

There’s a Brown, head bobbing in a steady twitch or unheard beat, who lays out a concupiscent-platform-sheet-sized piece of new cloth and cuts it with precise psionics, not a hint of char. The final piece is all one, still retaining most of the fabric from the start, a delicate bilaterally-symmetric web that implies circuits, bees, and stars on one end, blending smoothly into stalactites, stalagmites, and seahorrors on the other. There’s an informal lineup of other trolls’ projects to follow, and when the Brown leans back, four sets of hands whisk the sheet away to pin it to the top of several layers in a huge frame.

Two trolls you don’t know have finally set their matespritship commitment ceremony to the week after their ships join the space docks above Alternia. The ships are two perigees out and the pinners, evidently all clade, inclade, and friends of the former, are already stitching and complaining that that’s not a lot of time to finish the quilt properly.

It’s ridiculous to spend perigees making a temperature regulation plane that can be purchased for half the cost or less and may end up hideously stained. You remain engrossed.

There’s a lone Knitpickerist, a slim male cerulean clicking needles together, morsebeetles chatting. The scarf he’s making slowly resolves itself into cables and a pattern you can’t quite determine. You don’t know how he keeps track. The purrbeast has attacked his fiber twice and someone tossed it a plump ball of stuffed cloth. Now it’s sprawled on its back on his legs, idly pawing at the air.

You’ve been included in a gathering of Archicrafters, normally the domain of Church of Death and its adherents.

The bent Violet’s breath rattles in her chest, but her spindly thick-jointed fingers and claws are sure as she sorts tiny objects back and forth on a pillow on her lap. She catches you looking and beckons you closer. There’s a series of pins in the cushion and the objects she’s been sorting are cylinders of wood wrapped with thin black threads. The threads have a sheen of blue and brown, weaving together and apart and together again into two sets of tiny precise diamonds. You catch a faint whiff of dried blood. You recognize that it’s memory jewelry, though you don’t know what it’s called beyond that.

*

This is the manner in which, twice a perigee, you learn how to lift blood stains or set them, how to measure twice and cut once, how to untangle endless skeins of woolbeast fiber, and the best ways to exterminate shredmoths, mutual enemy of Archicrafters and librarians alike.

The members, at least four dozen so far, change between gatherings, but you see almost everyone at least twice, and the huge frame remains until the quilt is finished, wrapped, and captchalogued by a Yellow strong enough to maintain a warp pocket. There are three other brooders among the Archicrafters, two private and one on trir third state contract. Sooner or later, everyone brings something to eat or drink, but it’s not assigned and there’s no pattern you can determine.

You don’t have any old clothes to recycle and you can’t afford to accept new cloth, but you soon amass a heap of scraps that are deemed too good to toss and too small to use. You suspect that this latter part is a polite fiction on the part of the trolls telling you. A Yellow with a good eye for color and pattern helps you lay them out, snap pictures with your palmtop, and determine your favorite blend. You have started a composite quilt in a construction style known as “moonstruck”. The variety of stitches keeps you busy, even if you’re not very good at keeping them even.

There is something very satisfying about it.

*

Beneah visits you some nights when your schedules briefly coincide. On one of your continued grocery runs and cooking lessons, Kankri helps you find the smoky tea that the Green favors and the two, and sometimes three, of you share tea and talk about trolls you haven’t yet met and city policies and projects you’ve never heard of. It’s nice to be included. You may, perhaps, be developing Opinions of your own, even if you don’t share them.

You wish you could tell your younger self that there are good trolls in the city, that it would have been worth it to push a little further to find them.

*

A few times you have passed Kankri in the library halls or the upper levels librariquary catacombs. He is always happy to see you, even when he is clearly on the way elsewhere. You try not to hold him up. You still can’t help but smile at him.


	4. Chapter 4

The dorms are mostly university students and subsidized housing for university staff that can’t afford, or don’t rate, private residences. You learn from Kankri in the second perigee of your gestation that there are currently two other brooders in residence, a wry Blue on private contract to a Teal that visits her weekly, and the Yellow whose Teal matesprit owns and runs the dorm complex. Kankri introduces you.

The complex superviscerator is Latula, five sweeps your senior, a Teal with not-quite-stiletto horns, once assigned as culler for her yellowblooded matesprit, Mituna, double set of graceful stagger curved horns, from your sweep’s group. Their official assignment to one another lapsed two sweeps ago with the worst of his attention deficit and some clever filing. Mostly their matespritship works but when they argue, sometimes she defaults to old habits and it’s obvious that he can’t help but be resentful.

Overall, she’s pretty laidback and their desirable ground floor suite of rooms covers over half the building’s footprint and often sees cases of temporary cullees: allegations of abuse, culler-cullee assignments that don’t work out, transient injuries that can’t pay for housing while they’re out of work.

This is Mituna’s first attempt at carrying, the usual state-mandated first clutch waived and tyrian assistance acquired by virtue of Latula’s status as a Teal and inheritance as the first of a well-known but otherwise unclaimed teal sign. You meet him when he’s only two weeks into the process, still drowsy and achy from the implantation. Your gut aches in sympathy.

Three weeks in and the hormone shifts seem to actually be settling him, he gets more programming work done, and more sleep, than ever before, at least according to their hivemates, but Latula’s fluttering like he’s suddenly delicate is clearly driving him crazy. She knows it. He knows it. All their assorted cullees know it.

There’s a sort of sarcastic hand sign where, whenever she flutters, everyone sort of flaps a hand ineffectually and she backs off. The six sweep old Indigo, Xerrem Rexxel Perrat, is sprawled on the floor and some pillows. She doesn’t even look up from her palmtop as she completes the ritual.

The Brown is on semi-permanent couch rest while she waits for state-supplied prosthetics. She flaps the stump of her right arm and laughs when Latula tosses her hands in the air and stamps off to be useful elsewhere.

Orrena Dvwent, 28 sweeps, a bodacious Brown with incongruously tiny horns for her build, lost her right hand and foot on her independent fishing boat to an unfortunate confluence of mistimed wind, snapped lines, and a huge haul of sawtoothed mawfisheels, the only delicacy for which the starfleets will trade alien pharmaceuticals outside official channels. She’s still healing internal injuries.

She expresses regret at losing her boat, but not for saving her crew from the damage, or for saving the mildly hallucinogenic haul that set most of them up for the next ten perigees. She chucks you under the chin with her left hand, sits you on the couch with a tilt of her head and a wink, and bumps a hip against you companionably. She tells you that that fleet can always use another seadweller if you ever need a career change. You duck your head instinctually and don’t answer, her claws are polished to dull points that tickle. You are more than a little bit in awe of her. Kankri perches on the couch arm on your other side.

Mituna’s got the dirtiest mouth you’ve ever heard, including your brief repeated stints at the cullerium. He insults everyone without regard to caste, position, ablebodiness, or danger. In time, you venture to toss a couple back at him but mostly sit back and bask in the comfort of his cavalier attitude.

He teases Kankri unmercifully until Kankri flushes a bright rust and hides his head, impressive considering what you know he spends his nights doing at the clinic. Latula pulls Mituna into her lap like she can contain him. He writhes against her with deliberation and she flushes and Orrena whistles.

“Make it good, ‘Tunacakes!”

“Gross,” says Xerrem, finally looking up from her palmtop, the screen suddenly static as she pauses her quest. “Are all adults bugnuts?”

She stalks off with all the indignation accessible to a wriggler in the long stretch between grubscar callouses filling in and the final adult molt. She’s in a growth period, limbs gangly and hard to keep up with. Even the backward-facing sweep of her horns seems offended.

Mituna bounces back off Latula’s lap, slaps hands with Orrena’s raised stump and sprawls in Xerrem’s abandoned beanbugbag chair.

“To the victor go the thpoils!” He proclaims, and decatchalogues his ridiculously mismatched and patched palmtop in that casual manner in which truly powerful psionics warp space without thought. Orrena counters that she wants 10% for assistance rendered. He flicks a dried beanbug at her. She crunches it and tosses him a kiss.

You’re pretty sure adults are bugnuts.

*

You’d be jealous of the Pyrope-Captor enormous saltwater pool setup but Latula gives you a standing invitation and Mituna just rolls his eyes and tells you to visit or he’ll toss you in. You visit them, and their pool, at least once a week, often every night, and you didn’t realize how good unchlorinated water could feel. It doesn’t sting at all. You feel like you are flying.

Latuna seems oddly thrilled at your regular visits and encourages Mituna to join you when you swim. When he’s offshift, they’ve usually hit the public parks in the middleclass blue section of the city, run through wheeled-board acrobatics and trollparkour, but as his gestation progresses she tries to distract him with quest games and the pool. Now on freelance work, Mituna can shift his time off to match hers and seems frustrated that she doesn’t want to go out.

You know that Kankri privately handed her an actual printed list of all the usual things they get up to, carefully divided into dos and don’ts by perigee, and assures her repeatedly that there’s only miniscule danger in the former for the next three perigees and that the exercise outweighs what little there is.

The list has since been publically pinned to the fridge with all the shared schedule and reminders, but Latula remains unconvinced and continues her campaign of benevolent cluckhenbeasting, no matter who waves a flapping hand, or stump, at her.

There’s a line and you can see Mituna hit it sometimes, when he wants to say something and clenches his fists instead. There’s something to Latula’s distress that no one’s told you.

So usually when you visit to swim, Mituna comes with you to the pools. He’ll sit on the edge and dangle his feet in while you just float, belly up, gills and lungs in agreement, naturally switching off duties. You can feel his presence as soon as he dips a toe in, like there’s a field of electricity racing off and back.

Every visit, you swim over and tug a foot, careful not to actually pull him off balance. He might plant the other foot between your horns and push you off. He might flick you in the spots. He might slip himself in. He’s not a very efficient swimmer and you heckle him, and sometimes tow him, until his form improves.

He needles you that your racing stripes will soon be stretching stripes.

You learn that Xerrem swims every day, gangly limbs suddenly precise and graceful, a celeraeel cutting through the lap pool section, a harleyseal flipping smoothly over and reversing at the ends.

Orrena sticks to the warmer temperature-controlled round pool. It’s small with padded edges, a set of stairs, and seats. She coaxes the rest of you in as often as she can whenever Latula’s not around to dither. She even cajoles Kankri into borrowing a set of clothes from the emergency cullee cabinet and sliding in. The steam off the water eases the slight rasp from his breathing. You probably shouldn’t notice that.

Orrena wears just a set of shorts, rumblespheres a set of small volcanic islands emerging from the tropic heat. Mituna wears whatever he was already in when the urge or invitation strikes. Xerrem continues to wear her sleek fitted wetsuit and never changes in front of anyone else. Neither of you can stay very long when the pool is set to the higher settings.

You learn from Xerrem’s continuing campaign of distress over adult proclivities that this is where Mituna will lay his clutch when the time comes.

*

The indoor gardens around the pools are a gift from a grateful former resident and tending it gets passed on within the ever-changing community of transients. Xerrem isn’t allowed a strifekind any more than you are, but she wields a tiny set of ornate pruning scissors with a precision and concentration at odds with her otherwise gangly adolescent state out of the water. If you ask nicely, she is happy to tell you what the flowers are and why they are interesting and what they need to grow well. The hum of bees and the heavy scent of flowers are strangely soothing and you have fallen asleep in the garden more than once, wading your way through one of many books Jesara has loaned you.

The garden returns Xerrem’s care effusively and Mituna’s bees have never been fatter or faster. He’s been in a massive, multi-perigee, psionic-spitting argument online over the best sources, types, and combinations of propolis and pollen supplements and hybridization practices, and finally, finally, has triumphed, though the details entirely escape you.

He wins the title for a huge section of the city, a triangle of territory between the Bridge of Flowers in the haut culture part of town, the public Fountain of Fertile Frogs in one of the middleclass sections, and the Bridge of Draconic Wisdom in the now less popular outer part of town near the spaceport. It’s an unofficial honor outside of the relevant crowd, but it carries a modest tithe of bee drone lines by request, and he’s soon happily back into tracking and breeding. The hive frames gradually nibble away at any unused spaces. Huge spreadsheet records, calculations, and estimates are logged. Diminutive measuring devices, miniscule tools, and queen insemination traps are employed. The last of these make you vaguely nauseous.

One of his former competitors suffers an absconding swarm and loses all their computing augments. An SOS is tapped out on their palmtop. Mituna is magnanimous, or something like it, and drags both Xerrem and you along to witness, since gloating would be out of line in the circumstances. The four of you disinfect the Green’s entire hive top to bottom and Mituna promises to send a new queen and a small batch of workers and drones once the cleaning agents have had a chance to clear.

Back outside the Green’s hivestem, he is insufferably smug. It’s adorable. You can’t wait to see him when he’s too fat to bounce around as he does now. You think you might be crushing black just a bit, but you really don’t need complications.


	5. Chapter 5

At the Archicrafter gatherings, the Teals and Jades and Greens and Blues bring the most expensive snacks, delicacies you’ve never tasted before, but it’s done in a casual manner, and no one seems to feel indebted or resentful. The Browns and Yellows and Rusts and Indigos bring things you more or less recognize but often in combinations you’ve never tried. There are plenty of things that you’ve seen on the sites Kankri sent you for future cooking lessons, but few you’ve tried in your experiments yet. Recipes are exchanged.

One night the Violet brings a tiny elegant tray with tiny thin slices of butterfish, cut and arranged like an angry fat fish with prominent scales. The tray gets many admiring glances and no few compliments on her knife work. It gets passed around and almost everyone takes a little slice. Your slice is still cold, so thin it melts in the best of ways, and it tastes somehow fresh and also like a memory. It does not surprise you when you learn that this too is a form of art, fallen from favor after the Revolution, but regaining it as it is rediscovered and appropriated by the middleclass. It also doesn’t surprise you to find that butterfish costs four nights worth of meal credits.

Kankri escorts you to open air temporary markets in the middleclass blue section of town, to hidden groceries in the brown to green sections of town, to a few community plots in the rust to brown district that grow herbs he says he can’t find elsewhere. He knows a lot of trolls, he is greeted everywhere, he inquires after clade members, wrigglers, and grubs, some still in the egg. He chats freely and never leaves you behind.

You see your first grub from close up, a Green wrapped in a carry sling, carried by a Brown in trir herb garden. The Brown greets Kankri and hands him the grub. The grub’s face wrinkles up, like gre might cry. Kankri hefts grem a few times with a smile and he gets a laugh instead. He hands the grub back with compliments. You are impressed. You are astonished when the Brown offers to let you hold trir charge. Grubs are very… wiggly. You are afraid you’ll drop grem, your earfins snap out in shock. The grub stills and laughs at you instead. It is the first time in your life that you don’t mind being laughed at. Afterwards, back on your way, Kankri confesses that that particular hefting move that met with such success in grub entertainment has a certain risk of resulting in grub vomit instead of smiles, but that at least it serves to get a good idea of their weights.

*

You wheedle Kankri’s cluckbeast soup recipe from him, not that he resists. The secret ingredient is a set of seaweeds that get fished out when the soup is done. (Why are you not surprised that, yet again, he is more at ease in the port side of town, surrounded by fisherfolk and Indigos, than you, the supposed seadweller? You get propositions of the most indecent kind, enough to make you blush, duck, maybe want to bolt. His hand is warm on your back. He tosses back menacingly cheerful invective and one-handed gestures so fast you miss most of them. This only seems to make his audience laugh and back off. You are _not_ going back to that part of town alone.)

The seadweller-friendly dumplings are made with two types of rootstarch, a list of spices, and roasted then minced searoaches. The last of these, one of the spoils of your venture to the docks, is currently still scurrying about in a basin on your counter. You are a terrible seadweller and dread killing them. You resist giving them names. (The pseudosandscorplion doesn’t count – it’s not a ‘roach. Wouldn’t want to mess with the recipe. Its name is now Tidbit and it always seems happy to swim over for a bit of veg or leftovers.)

You sink a week’s worth of mealchits into ingredients, borrow a huge locking crock and a set of mitts from the cafeterrialist who always sneaks you extra, spend at least five hours killing, roasting, peeling, chopping, mixing, rolling, peeling, mixing, and simmering, and then finally, haul the massive, aromatic, steaming contraption across the city, garnering more than one double take and a conciliatory proposal (more decent than the last set) on the way. It is wider than you, not quite a third as tall, and heavier than most of the waste canisters you hauled at your old job. It is lucky that you are a seadweller.

You efforts are met with effusive praise and requests for the recipe. A Blue born before the Expatriate confesses that it’s just like trir lusus made and that tre hasn’t had it quite right since the old tentanticlerbeast passed. The Violet hair tatting specialist cackles a not unkind laugh and pats trir shoulder.

It’s a full room that night and the pot is scrapped clean.

*

It’s nice to have someone who always seems happy to listen to you. Tidbit is a good listener and you don’t need to be embarrassed trying to get your thoughts in order, you can just let everything tumble out and sort it as it goes.

You tell it about Mituna and Latula and Orrena and Xerrem, whatever you’ve discussed most recently with Jesara or Beneah, your newest tasks at the library, your impressions of each of the Archicrafters, the new route you took to the library that night. You confess to it about how much you depend on Kankri, and how guilty you feel that you don’t feel worse about it.

Tidbit taps its tail on the walls of the basin or on your fingers as you feed it, the tip blunt and not in the least bit pointed like a really sandscorplion. Sometimes it shakes its tiny collar of mane or dances on just two or four legs. It’s maybe half a mouthful and so full of personality you feel protective.

Kanki helps you find another basin in your now twice weekly grocery runs together. Tidbit seems to show no preference, but it’s a relief to be able to have a backup while you clean the most recently occupied habitat.

You think that this is what it feels like to be content.


	6. Chapter 6

You mess up. In the last four perigees you’ve met more trolls, and crossed more of the city, than you ever have before. You get confident, and then you get incautious. You had finally felt safe by yourself.

You cross the Bridge of the Embrace of Gl'bgolyb’s Tentacles on the way back from the library, just a half hour before dawn. The Archicrafters ran late tonight, and the lightening sky makes you squint. You come around a corner by the Orphaner’s Obelisk, and you’re in a crowd of Greens and maybe a Blue. There is surprise on both sides, a strong whiff of alcohol and sweat, and then there are hands all over you. They wear creased uniforms with the same ship designation. They react as crew.

You freeze for a moment, your instinct to fight and your fear to be culled in conflict, but they’re already on you. You start to struggle. There are hands on your horns and your face and your arms, wrapped around your neck, locked on your wrists. You’ve always tried to keep your nails balanced between too short to be considered a challenge and too long to be an easy target, but despite your supposed seadweller strength, you can’t reach any of them enough to do damage. You want your knife. You’ve never owned one outside your kitchen.

There are arms around your waist. One of them hits you in the gills and that’s it, you gasp, a beached fish thrashing. They are pulling you backwards and down. Off balance and unable to breathe, all you can do is curl around your middle and hope they don’t hit you there. They try to uncurl you and you hear one of them read your IDchit.

“Shit, state brooder.” Someone else swears and some of the hands loosen.

“Who cares, I wanna see his gills.”

“Nah, not worth it. You wanna mess with some Jade’s pet project?”

There’s more, but they’ve slipped into their ship’s patois, and you can’t discern more than a few words of the argument over your gasps for air.

There’s a sharp stern multi-whistle of a legislacerator’s, “Move along. Crowd disperse.” It’s not the higher cascade and accusation of, “Halt. Submit to the Authority.” You can hear the sharp click of legislacerator boots running.

They back off and run. You’re still on the ground. One of the officers checks you over and scans your IDchit to log the disturbance. There’s a prick of green blood under a few of your claws, and a laceration on your delicate neck gills. You can taste a trickle of blood down your throat. Your ribs and main gills throb. You still can’t pull in quite enough oxygen.

The officer swabs your nails and levers you up and lets go and you can stay standing or fall back. You stagger, but stand. He tells you that you can come to the station and file a report but that you’ll have to stay overday due to the time. You just want to be back in your apartment. You can still make it in time if you leave now. You shake your head.

The other Teal tells you to stay out of trouble. “We’re always watching, coldbood. Wherever you go.”

You feel a shock of something like the surprise you felt when you locked up a few minutes before. You’re shivering.

It’s not the first time you’ve been harassed, or regarded as the general property of anyone higher in the spectrum, or the first shove, but it is the first time anyone’s restrained you or had you on the ground. It’s the first time failing would mean more than disappointing yourself, endangering anything other than yourself.

You are one of the few Violets in the city. You have absolutely no doubt that you are the only one stupid enough to be outside at this time.

*

Kankri knows of course. Your appointments are now once a week and he isn’t scheduled to check in with you for another three nights, but he messages you to ask if he can stop by. You don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to think about it. You can’t say no.

He brings you a mild soup, checks you over, asks you if you want to discuss it. You shake your head. He tells you that the grubs are fine, that you were brave to protect them. He is half your size and he cradles you as you weep into his shoulder.

You don’t go out for the next week. Beneah stops by every night and knocks. You don’t answer him, but he slips a note under your door the first night, and there’s a bag of cafeteria offerings left behind each time. A few of them have bars of sweetened toasted seeds and beetles, wrapped and signed with the kind cafeterrialist’s sign and a little doodle of their horns. You have never understood the allure of sugar, but the crunch is somehow satisfying.

You feed Tidbit and it seems happy to see you. It crawls up your hand for the first time, sits in your palm. You wonder if it can tell you’re upset, or if this is just another way that your head is not quite right. You offer it a bit of a bar and it clutches the morsel, shredding the seeds, rotating it, picking out the beetles. Then it kicks a few seeds off your palms, grooms itself, shakes a full body shake, and settles down for a nap.

Mituna messages you every hour, on the hour, always yet one more in which he is clearly awesome. You don’t answer, but you check them when you’re awake, and as the “reasons” get more ridiculous and convoluted, sometimes he startles out a laugh. You don’t think he knows what happened. You don’t want him to know.

Your skin itches and you can’t wash it off.

You sit on the floor of the shower for hours at a time and concentrate on breathing. It hurts, too much humidity for your lungs to breathe easily, too much air for your gills to do more than pull.

Latula, miraculously, doesn’t try to be understanding inside your space, but keeps it to polite messages and invitations once a night.

Kankri stops by at his regularly scheduled time and doesn’t push.

Tidbit treats you the same as always.

*

The next week you have a craving for tea. You bid Tidbit goodbye with the unnecessary lingering of an onscreen love interest, cross the city like a wary antlerbeast and wind your way through the catacombs to Jesara’s and she greets you with sincerity but no pity. She doesn’t ask where you’ve been. You resume your visits, but you take the straightest ways through the city and stick to public transit routes when you can. You go around corners wide. You still shake.

You cross the Bridge of the Vorpal Hopbeasts and feel a prickle. You look up. There’s a legislacerator on his rounds and he points to his eyes and thrusts two claws at you. The gesture clearly means, “I’m watching.” You freeze. He tosses his horns in your direction and strides away just as another troll rounds a corner. You are careful not to bolt the rest of the way.

*

You make yourself make the trip every other night. There’s a Teal every time, usually at a different point in your route. You don’t know what you did wrong. Maybe it’s a game to them. They only appear when there are no other witnesses.

On the nights Jesara doesn’t expect you, you stay in your apartment.

Tidbit now comes when called, sits up to reach for snacks, lays down on request, and mimics claw taps with its tail. If you play a song on your palmtop or if you hum, it will tap in time. You wonder how smart non-lusii are and if anyone else cares. You’ve shredded two quilt squares and started a third with its profile embroidered on. You give this one a soft plush mane and you sew a pocket into your oldest shirt so Tidbit can sit with you while you stitch.

At the next Archicrafter gathering, the knitpickerist gifts you with a soft gray scarf and you recognize the horns and two outstretched hands of Lady Luck. He also gifts you with his name, Presthetician Knitwit. He says it’s only fair considering how many skeins of woolbeast fiber you’ve bullied into docility on his behalf. When you wrap it loosely around your shoulders, the Lady is embracing you. It’s not pity. He walks you home.

After that, someone always walks you home after gatherings. The Blue in maintenance lives two neighborhoods from you and walks with you on non-gather nights. Jesara never sends you home with any of her other visitors. You see Legislacerators, feel the prickle of their gaze, but they don’t do anything else.


	7. Interlude: Kankri: Instill Respect

You are furious with yourself. Even on the night you first met Cronus, you had misgivings about his readiness for brooding.

You, of all trolls, know that emotional and physical maturity are not the same. He was clearly nervous and scared. You tried to give him an out, you confirmed his intent several times, but you didn’t stop him.

You could have. You have worried for the past few perigees that you should have, but you have been doing everything you can think of to help him gain the confidence and the life skills that the mishmash of private and state custodians failed to help him learn. This is on top of your regular duties, state and private, and your duties to trolls to whom your responsibilities are greater than what is merely assigned by official duties. You are unsure if your sense of panic regarding him is due solely to the severity of his situation or if it is due to the cumulative stress of your responsibilities. It doesn’t matter. You can’t fail him. You can’t be allowed to fail any of your responsibilities. No one made you assume them, therefore it is entirely on you if you fail to meet your commitments.

You had ignored your gut reaction, forged forward on the strength of the evaluator’s exam and Cronus’s insistence, which you now know to be desperation. You have discussed this with Acanth Grapti, and found little likelihood of any change in his behavior. It may be time to raise issues of professional ethics with all of your staff. Moderate stress is good for all organisms, it helps them grow. Acanth is technically not _your_ staff, but the director’s, that is, the Dolorosa’s. In practice, it is you who run the Practical Applications Practice Department in its nightly operations and most short to mid-term projects. You will be dead long before any long-term agendas come to fruition, but not, you hope, before you finish reforming it.

You are frustrated with Acanth’s behavior, but it is the product of an earlier age. You on the other hand, have no such excuse but stupidity in trusting him and so you are furious with yourself. That has not saved Acanth from a curious glitch by which the system can never find the completed results of his sensitivity training. It is easy enough to answer the questions in the manner one knows is expected. Complying with the spirit of such guidelines is an entirely different matter. The system will continue to accumulate such quirks until either he learns, or leaves.

Tonight you are furious with more than yourself. Last night Cronus was assaulted on a public street by a freighter crew and you don’t know how far it might have gone if the legislacerators hadn’t shown up. As it is, you are less than pleased with them for their unconcerned mien.

You know about the incident because they scanned his IDchit and anything logged as an incident on the state networks that corresponds to a state-contracted brooder crosses your desk. Also logged are lifecode matches for the blood under his claws and that he declined to file a report. Cronus is not state property. The eggs he is brooding are. Had they been damaged, you could file a suit for damages on behalf of both the state and the Practical Applications Practice Department. As it is, you are relieved that they appear unharmed, but you fully intend to defend their defender if he can’t yet manage it himself.

From the lifecode matches, you know at least two of the perpetrators are crew on the _BR Burdle Pit_.

From Cronus, you know that all the perpetrators are crew. You also know that they got as far as they did because he didn’t want to fight back and get culled as violent. You know why he didn’t file a report. You know how he moves when he hurts in all his gills, and deeper, in the part where self-identity dwells. You know what he sounds like when he cries. Your shirt is damp with it. You would have stayed longer but after he cried himself out, his muscles pulled tighter and tighter until, when it felt like he would snap, you finally asked and he admitted that he didn’t want to be touched right now, wanted to be alone. He had been too scared to tell you.

You have always been the youngest, the supplicant, the physically least imposing. Your personality and demeanor have been shaped by it until you are fully prepared to evaluate and politely bulldoze as appropriate. You have never before met an adult as timid and emotionally fragile as Cronus, and you have fumbled it.

He had been doing so well, growing so much. He smiled easily, he asked for so little, but you had been so pleased that you could encourage a few more smiles, could foster some independence. You have watched him bloom. You are afraid that he will lose all the progress he made. Worse, you are afraid that he might not recover it. You have never been so furious. You had done your best to show him that he didn’t need to be afraid to meet people, to venture out by himself. You were wrong, and he is hurting. You have failed, but you won’t let yourself continue to do so. If you can’t help Cronus now, you’re going to work on the other end of the problem for a bit.

Techtonic {TT} has signed on forum 174a9g84v/5176w98r&7r844f97537r9v84dfb4ge97r276937u988%

TT: ?

??: ?

TT: Burdle Pit. What is it smuggling?

BR: ETA?

TT: Departure?

DD: 6 nights 5 hours

TT: 2 hours?

22: Yes.

Techtonic {TT} has signed off forum 174a9g84v/5176w98r&7r844f97537r9v84dfb4ge97r276937u988%

If you had not entered the Practical Applications Practice Department at such an early age, if you had not already found your vocation, the fulcrum from which you honestly believe you can do the most good, you think that you would have been happy to be a librainiac.

The Library is full of resources. The books, the datagrubs, the artifacts, the _things_ , are just some of them. The most powerful resources in the Central Library are the librarians, in all their specialties and affiliations, from the cataloggerists who keep everything organized and linked, to the librainiacs who can memorize and synthesize massive sections of the collections, to the generations of libritarians who have defended it so well that it has something like its own sovereignty, to the psychics who speak with the dead and record their stories before they move on, or put them down if they don’t.

You have two hours to calm yourself, complete or rearrange what you can of your schedule for tonight through tomorrow night, and get over to the Librariquary basement so Sethin can tell you everything he’s found on the _BR Burdle Pit_.

When the two of you are done, you will know every last crew member and their every relationship, past or present or unresolved crush, what they’ve done that they shouldn’t have, what they respect, what they fear, what they believe in.

When the two of you are done, you will have a list of crimes committed and the punishments or applicable fines. You will have blackmail and a psych profile on everyone from the captain and the helmsman to the least ensign on sanitation rotation. You will know their every purchase, their every post, their every shame.

Then you will make a social call to Captain Sledgehand and her crew, and you will have a Discussion about Respect. Participation will not be optional.


	8. Chapter 8

“Jesara?” You wait until she looks up from her datapak. “Does anyone ever try to bug the library? Or steal something from it?”

“It’s unlikely, but possible. However they’re unlikely to succeed, we have a rather fervent security system, and libritarians are known to be exceedingly territorial. Goodness, have you met Sethin yet?”

“Naw, mostly try to avoid anyone on my way in.”

“Hmm, an oversight on my part not to introduce you more formally now that you visit regularly. Anyhow, Sethin Torrin was the library’s chief cataloggerist during the transition periods between the Revolution and Reformation, and truthfully, even if I do say it myself, the best that we have ever had during my centuries of tenancy.

“He was rather upset at the callous disregard for cultural history during the upheavals and was responsible for securing a great many no-longer-convenient documents and datagrubs, as well as installing the weapons grade dehydrators – very clever, they dust people but don’t affect books at all, nor data grubs so long as they’re in their cases.

“He also knew that he wouldn’t be able to protect his life’s work forever, but he made provisions. We found his body 26 sweeps into the current era in the subbasement stacks between the section on artifact preservation techniques and taxidermy, but he never really left.”

She frowns.

“His sense of humor never really matured either. There’s still the position of chief cataloggerist, of course, he doesn’t really have hands you know, but they have to answer to Sethin.

“Sethin, dearie, are you about?” She doesn’t move her head but her eyes unfocus a bit.

A golden glow coalesces on the couch next to you. It has the outline and faint details of a troll with short stiletto horns, thinner and a half head shorter than you. You wouldn’t be able to guess its age, but it doesn’t look anything like old enough to keel over in the stacks. Its eyes, or equivalent, flicker orange and gold. It’s staring at you and quirks a smile. Your palmtop chimes.

ST: Hello, BR51:C1:“M1”:V2:86481.

“Um. Hi. You can call me Cronus.” You’ve never met a ghost before, if that’s what he is. You glance down at your IDchit, it’s got an extra three digits, no quotation marks. He’s referring to you by your pre-evaluation grub ID. You wonder how much access he has to the population records, to all records, and if it’s limited to the library physically or to what’s networked in too.

The apparition winks an eye at you, darts in Jesara’s direction, and flows back up a vent. You think it might have bussed her cheek on the way past.

Your palmtop chimes again.

ST: CA, if you need anything in the library, just call.

“He doesn’t like to be long out of touch with his catalogiquaries or bees,” Jesara explains, a fond smile pulling at her reserved paint. “Without a greater distraction than your rather polite presence, it makes him rather twitchy.”

That really doesn’t explain much. But then again, she didn’t ask you why you asked. You realize that as much as Jesara poses uncomfortable questions, and finds a quiet glee in surprising you, she never pushes when you hesitate to answer. You think you trust her. You think that she might be a friend.

You think that you are more comfortable in this subterranean hive with its mismatched blankets, walls of neat bookshelves, and adorabloodthirsty purrbeast, than you’ve ever been in any other physical place, even your hivestem. Latula and Mituna would protect you, like they would any of their fosters or tenants, but they also expect something of you, and you’re not always sure what to say or do. Your apartment is your own, but here, you think, it feels safer because this is Jesara’s territory and she would not willingly allow danger nigh.

You close your eyes for a moment and imagine that this must be a bit what it’s like to live in one’s hive, with one’s lusus still alive. You are careful not to wish that Kankri was here too. He makes you feel safe, but it is not fair to expect more. He is not yours.

*

After that conversation, Jesara expands your library tasks and varies your hours, and you learn the names of the rest of the staff.

There’s Horuss Zahhak, the dark Blue on maintenance who’s been escorting you home without a word. His arrow tipped horns peer out from above a hat that’s more helmet than anything and he keeps his eyes hidden. He’s probably about your age, but he doesn’t talk much.

He comes to the not-quite-mandatory end-of-night hail-fellow-well-met staff meetings and stands at the edge of the crowd, always ready to slip away. He’s usually covered in dust and oil stains but you can’t really blame him. The library is not only a great big pile of knowledge, it is a giant dust magnet. (Where does all the dust come from? Do Sethin’s dehydrators just willy-nilly take out library patrons that bring in ink pens or datagrub dissection kits?)

There’s a lighter Blue on the circulation desk, Aranea Serket, asymmetrical horns a harpoon point and crescent moon, not unlike Lady Luck. You know she’s near your age group and you know that she’s a friend of Porrim’s. She’s friendly but you can’t help but wonder how much of it just a tendency to cull you as friend of Porrim’s. You can’t quite bring yourself to trust her.

*

The cheerful Brown you first met is Nakerm Kozzel Maryam, two sweeps older than you, and passed off from his original culler to the tender mercies of institutionalized culling because the Jade found his wigglerhood declared vocational path excessively obsessive. (Boooring, apparently, but it serves him well enough.)

Appearances aside, he is the library specialist in cursed and haunted artifacts and he _is_ an expert. You’d doubt some of the things he tells you but the other staff members all take his reports at face value, so you’re pretty impressed that he’s neither dead nor possessed yet. You are also NEVER going into the museumiquary sections of the sub-sub-basements by yourself.

When he’s off duty he takes you on tours of the city, and you learn more about the place you’ve lived most of your life than you ever thought to know. You visit some of the same places that Kankri has shown you, but Nakerm has a very different view of what is important in those places.

He takes you to every single bridge in the city and explains the style and engineering conventions.

He takes you _under_ every single bridge in the city, iconography painted overhead, and shows you the clever manual locking mechanisms to access the sun shelters intended for travelers caught outside.

He shows you the peace signs to use with their more permanent residents, who symbiotically keep them clean, stocked, and the locks oiled. The Bridgekeepers are an informal position, off the regulation of the Rationality, predating it back to the construction of the city’s first bridges. They deny no troll in need of shelter, provided that they offer no threat first. There are no few Sufferists among them.

Of course, he doesn’t _just_ show you bridges.

There’s the Hall of Rationality where the chief Judicererrist and Benevolent Mother sit enthroned when the Legislancerists and Caballistas convene. Nakerm tells you that within these hallowed halls of government sit two ridiculously prim side tables flanking those thrones and that the tables’ front legs are the horns of the Highblood and the once Imperious Condensation. You don’t go in of course, the two of you are sitting on a public fountain across from the marble steps, but there’s something unexpectedly exhilarating when Nakerm leans in conspiratorially and tells you how both the Teals and the Jades have in this instance succumbed to revenge, and worse, bad taste. You cover your mouth quickly. You didn’t expect to _laugh_. You slide this bit of trivia away to keep for Beneah.

*

There’s the helmsman hospital in the spaceport, functional, neutral, a place of unintended horrors.

After the Summoner declared helmsmen to be trolls, and citizens, not equipment, every ship in the fleet, or private hands, was required to wake their helmsman at their next stop on Alternia, to offer them the chance to be decommissioned. The fleet was far-flung and the process took decasweeps. Many elected to stay as they were. Many had no one to come home to. Many came home to die. Of those who successfully completed the decommissioning, the process to readjust to life as a troll and not a ship was long and difficult. A few elected to go back into the rig, now that the rigs were detachable, now that there were rules for their treatment, overrides to prevent abuse.

There are a few pockmarked ships in the hospital port, and Nakerm is solemn as he tells you that there are still a few ships that come in each sweep, only now having made it back after seventy sweeps. He tells you how the hospital is always looking for volunteers, how the medical and engineering teams, accomplished as they have become after decasweeps of practice, can only do so much and that the worse thing for trolls adapting from the near instantaneous feedback of their ships to the slower, damaged responses of their own physical hardware, is to be left alone.

More than a few former helmsmen have been lost to psionic explosions when an adapting psionic was left alone too long and the time stretched out to an eternity in their own minds. He tells you that the library has a continuously changing broadcast that never stops, specifically designed to give lonely or lost trolls something to listen to, a messaging channel should they wish to respond, and he tells you that he thinks you might enjoy the work, should you try it.

Nakerm tells you too that there is no record of the decommissioning of the Condesce’s flagship, now the _BR Adamantine Embrace_ , that for all the talk of freewill, the most powerful engine of the empire is still in chains.

*

There’s the stone overlooking the city and the ocean where the Sufferer died still trying to speak his last sermon.

Nakerm leads you up the steep hill, up thousands upon thousands of tiny stone steps, often overgrown with grass, more than a few cracked, or tilted, or missing. The Sufferer’s Stone is almost a pillar, a natural formation where the rock of the cliffs surges free of the grass and dirt. The manacles are still there, a mass of iron inexplicable melted and warped above where the Sufferer’s head would have been. There’s no one there when you get there, no one on the stairs after, but there are flowers and sweets and tiny pieces of paper, rolled and tied with a strand of hair or blade of grass and weighed down with rocks. The mass of them forms a knee-high mound and some of the flowers are still fresh. There are no loose rocks up here, so every petitioner must have brought their own.

“Someone is always up here tidying up,” Nakerm tells you, “and there’s usually a bit of a to do on First Night. All the stones get pitched over, your troubles with them. It’s good to start a new sweep clean.”

You turn away from the rock and you catch your breath at how full and big and beautiful the ocean is from here. To the left, down below, the city is a pattern of lights and neighborhoods, innocent of individuals. Behind you, lights twinkle from expensive luxury apartments carved into the cliffs several bluffs away, facing the city. Before you is only the drop of the cliff, the flower-speckled grass, the sky, and the ocean. Now that you have stopped hiking, you can hear the surf clearly. The natural formation of the bluff drops down and levels, surges up again before dropping off. It’s a natural amphitheater and you realize that as the sun rose, it would have touched down first on the rock, the spectators all sheltered. There’s a giant door set in the ground, far enough away to be unnoticed at first, but close enough to provide the spectators shelter when their own discomfort outweighed their bloodthirst. It’s a beautiful place, and for all you know that something terrible happened here, there is something peaceful about it, unrushed, quiet, unthreatening. You notice the tiny movements of wild bees visiting the flowers in the grass. The winds are strong and capricious up here and the bees fly low to the ground and frequently land to wait out a stronger gust. Still, they persevere.

“The flowers up here are crysnanthes. They’re usually white to ultraviolet. This is the only place where they grow red. The hill’s been scraped clean more than once by order of the Condesce, but they keep coming back, just like the Sufferists.”

Nakerm sounds fond at this and he unpacks three cylindrical sandwiches and hands you one. The second one, still wrapped, is tucked between the pile and the stone. He sits down there and opens the third. You join him and he tells you about other First Night traditions, things that predate the Condesce.

He tells you how, down by the docks, where the harbor peters out into estuary and marsh, there’s a beach that’s fairly safe to swim. For millennia, trolls who have lost a clade member have kept some memento of them, hair, or bone, or a tallow candle from the Church of Death. On the First Night, a volunteer will carry all the mementos to the sea, to free both departed and living from the burden of one another. It’s best if the volunteer has broad horns, so that they can carry all their burdens at once, but a psionic will do as well. Nakerm tells you all about the First Night Princivigilis, who walks to the ocean wreathed in fire, or amid a galaxy of stars, trailed by a cloud of ghosts.

“When the Condesce forced the adults off planet, she hoped to make the children left behind more malleable to her, no longer bound to one another in community but to her alone. What the Condesce never understood is that a troll will go twice as far in their efforts to cultivate and defend something that returns their efforts as to duty alone. She wanted to distill trolls, hone us to her own likeness. She could have been magnificent, if only she had been a bit _more_. It’s really a bit of a shame.” And he sounds more cheerful about Her than anyone you’ve ever heard discuss the deposed Empress.

You’re not a Sufferist, but here in the quiet you can’t bring yourself to believe that the Sufferer would mind. You’re still kind of hungry, you’re always hungry to some extent, Kankri likes to remind you that you may very well be in a growth spurt even as the developing grubs are, but you wrap up the second half of the sandwich and tuck it behind the pile. You don’t need anything, it isn’t a request or a prayer, you just, you just want to express your gratitude for the quiet. You already know you want to come back, and you’re not sure you’ll have the courage to come alone.

*

The Bridge of the SeaGoat’s Tithe is the longest bridge in the city and it stretches from the marshes to the docks to the now diminished last Church of Mirth in the city. It is painted in ever-changing sweeps of hatchsigns, jokes, and murals. It has historically been “fed” at the start of the sweep but is now monitored by the Legislacerators for the two perigees bracketing the First Night of New Sweep.

“Most of the offerings now are probably Faygo and a bit of self-inflicted blood loss,” Nakerm cheerfully informs you. “Though, plenty of the murals smell more like slurry than anything else! There’s no other way to get enough opacity and coverage.”

Nakerm brings you to the dock section mid-night, clear of the peak times for the crowds of young newly molted adults roaming, out to prove themselves, or the bars emptying out intoxicated fisherfolk and off duty fleeties.

Inside the sun shelter, there are rooms with walls stacked in troll bones, lit with the flicker of glowworms and fungi through the eyeholes of still horned skulls. Most are visibly old, some not so much. Some rooms have trolls among the bones, and some are only the dead. There is a soft sound in most of the halls and rooms, a combination of distant or quiet voices, and maybe the surf.

In a small quiet room, Nakerm pats a skull on the crest of its pale dome and tells you this was one of his mentors, that the Church of Death did a good job preparing her in the method of her preference. He hooks a claw in a hidden catch and flicks open a section of hinged skull, drops a small chunk of something inside. He closes the skull back up, lights a short stick of incense, and slides it into a gap in the side teeth. The skull’s wide glowing eyesockets are staring at you, but now it reminds you a bit of Agatha, though less scary. He bows a friendly courtesy to the skull and guides you back out.

You are still terrified, and desperately want to be elsewhere, but you start to understand how some trolls can picnic down here, in the company of (very old) friends and enemies.

*

The Bridge of Flowers in the fancy haut culture Jade section of the cities is all simple lines, but its railings are heaped in tiny blooming plants, painting them jade with spots of other colors. The iconography under the bridge is elegant and uncontroversial, all non-carnivorous flowers and suns and oil lanterns. The connected sunshelter is a different story.

Inside, at first, the ceilings are mosaics of stylized star maps, exotic, but also inoffensive. You trail Nakerm as he softly greets the Bridgekeepers and winds his way deeper in, further down. Everyone here wears a gray cloak and many have tinted glass over their eyes. The effect is spooky but no one tries to approach you. You wonder how they can see.

You’ve lost track of the turns and the lightening is uneven. You are grateful that Nakerm allows you to hold on to one of his sashes. The floor has become a bit less even, you must be under an entirely different district, and you’re concentrating on not tripping, when he stops. You look up and something in you seizes.

You’re in a grotto, lined with padded benches and lit by lines of cultivated glowworms. There’s a mural of the Mother of Sorrows and her face is grave and somehow the saddest thing you’ve ever experienced.

She’s cradling a troll her own size, spilling from her lap, limp, clearly dead. His face and horns are Kankri’s. His wrists bleed red.

*

It’s a while before you can see anything else, and you realize you’re still clutching Nakerm’s sash. You let go and turn to apologize, but he merely smiles and gestures to the walls you haven’t noticed. There’s a host of other trolls on both sides, the crowd before and after the execution, mostly in shadowed grays picked out in flashes of eyeshine and mobfrenzy-drawn blood. The Empress is an amorphous silhouette watching.

The Highblood’s painted face is tipped back in laughter, his huge hands the size of half-grown wrigglers, a pitted and stained club propped on one shoulder, overall utterly terrifying, even 70 sweeps dead and reduced to two dimensions.

The Marquise Spinneret Mindfang wears a cocky grin in both murals. Whomever the Master Archicraftist is, you can recognize in her stance the force that broke the seadwellers’ hold of the seas in the Summoner’s Revolution and is now sailing the stars, forever exiled from the Benevolent Rationality’s Alternia.

The Disciple is a savage and beautiful coil of rage and sorrow.

The Psionic is lit within a cage of his own light and the dampening grounders.

The Executioner’s horns tilt behind another body in the crowd, the most distinctive identifying mark the stretch of his arms and bow singing with tension. There are pearls of sweat beading his near arm.

There’s a surprisingly elegant rust to one side of the before mural. Her horns are the huge swirls of squidlyshellbeasts. Her blank face is somehow familiar. She does not appear in the second mural.

In the before scene, the Sufferer is clearly still speaking, even tortured as he is. In the after, his body, still shackled to the execution stone, is mostly concealed by the turmoil of the crowd. He looks a bit less like Kankri in these two paintings, because Kankri always tries to maintain a certain equilibrium and there is nothing _mild_ about the Sufferer’s torture and death.

There’s a seadweller at the edge of both murals, in part concealed, horns unclear in both, but by position next to the Empress, clearly the same troll on both the before and after walls, clearly somehow important that he isn’t dismissed in the same way as the crowd. His scarred face, frozen in a snarl, is neither triumphant, nor devastated in the before. His face in the after is tipped away. His fins are pinned back in both, but you cannot read their stillness. You wonder if this is what people think of when they think of Violets. Cold. Alien. 

It’s clearly a Sufferist work, but it’s nothing like you’ve ever seen in the brief schoolfeedings of dry historical events, the dry summaries of religious and vocational affiliations, approved or unapproved. There is nothing _minor_ or _obsolete_ or _irrelevant_ about this.

You take a long time to come back to yourself.

You think you have questions, but you don’t know what they are.

When you are ready to leave, Nakerm starts to point out the navigation signs in the walls, floor, and ceilings, and tells you that this complex of caverns covers most of the city and ties into caves under the library and out to the coast.

He takes you out through the sunshelter on the north bank of the Bridge of the Cat’s Cradle, a stand of jungle carved and grown in stone and wormsteel. You wouldn’t have noticed where the shelters connect, except for one final inscription that encircles the floor and walls and ceiling at the meeting point.

“ _There is a better world. It is already here, sleeping, and waking, and dreaming among each of us, and each of us a part of it._

_“You must choose, in thought, and word, and deed._

_“Will you cultivate the garden, strengthen the hive, weave together the netted web of peoples within your reach, or will you trample, destroy, sow discord?_

_“When your beloved asks you, ‘Why?’, will you answer in shame or certainty?_ ”

The word for world is not Alternia, or the galaxy, or the universe, but one that refers to any and every planet capable of supporting sentience, to any mind capable of questioning. The word for peoples is not exclusive to trolls. The word for beloved is archaic, and not specific to quadrants. You’ve heard some of this before, but not all in one place or with quite the same words.

You feel like you have found something important, but are not yet able to articulate how.

*

There’s a tiny thin yellow in acquisitions, Sarita Malnek, bladekind, forty sweeps. Her double set of stiletto horns are as sharp as her smile. She scares you a bit until you realize that she’s Nakerm’s matesprit and she’s inexplicably fond of you, as, you later realize, she is of most of the library’s usual denizens. Her lusus is a small predator bird that spends its nights drowsing on perches through the library. Sometimes the perches are people. When she first lands on your shoulder you freeze, wondering if she’ll go for you fins or gills or eyes first. She cocks her head at you and grooms your hair. You close your eyes so you don’t get hair in them and swallow a few times. You’re not a bit homesick for your lusus, really. You can’t remember them. How can you be homesick for something that might never have existed?

Sarita has a dry wit. Sometimes the things she says make you catch your breath as you realize they are truths you never thought of, or dared to articulate, and you know why she and Nakerm fit one another so well.


	9. Chapter 9

The current cataloggerist, Tarren Carent, is a Teal of maybe 80 sweeps, with chainsawkind and glasses on a beaded chain and handsome short quirked horns that point back at each other. Thick at the base and razor sharp at the ends, they are precisely symmetrical and terrifyingly cute. Tre’s just a tad plump and dimples when tre smiles. You think you’re imagining it the first time you see trir skirts rustle while tre logs in new old volumes of the nightly, weekly, and perigeenial publications from the periodicals circulation section to the archives. _Punishment & Crime_. _Nightly Newsgasps_. _Rationality and Legislation_. It’s the seventh perigee of the 61 st sweep of the Era of Benevolent Rationality, and you are in the sixth perigee of your gestation. Tre’s logging in everything from the last week of the sixth perigee, include bi-sweeply publications, so the load’s pretty heavy. Tre’s humming, apparently pleased to have plenty to fill the shift.

Trir skirts rustle again. You’re not imagining it.

Tarren is appointed culler to a violet wriggler just past grubhood. The wriggler peeks past trir skirts and hides again, giggling. You’re fascinated. You realize that you’ve never seen a Violet so young, not since you were. You’ve never seen many at all really.

You’re supposed to be sorting periodicals for damage. You end up on the floor with an equally fascinated, but more easily distracted, wriggler in your lap.

Tarren’s office is off the main level, easily accessible from most of the library, but certainly not the central artery for everyone to meander through on their way elsewhere. Nonetheless, throughout the night, while Tarren clucks a bit at damaged nightlies, and the wriggler explores the office and returns repeatedly to you or grir skirt tent, every single staff member manages to make their way through.

Every. Single. One.

Serket comes by to see if there are any extra copies of _Phrenology Fanatics_ , the two thumb thick bisweeply gossip edition with the foldouts of horns. She leaves one magazine richer and three rich seagrain fish pies poorer. She is clutching the volume in an almost unseemly manner and there’s a blush across her high cheekbones. It makes you like her a bit more to know something less than perfectly proper about her.

Tarren cuts one pie in half and consumes it neatly. Halfway through your first cycle, you are finally starting to show and constantly famished. Your pie disappears like a fictitious force. The wriggler makes a mess of grir half. Tarren cedes you the last pie. You wipe crumbs from the wriggler’s face and gre wriggles free. You play pounce and get the rest of the crumbs off. Gre smiles at you, tiny needle-sharp teeth still a collection of pie contents. You are clearly outclassed in this match.

Tarren hums appreciation as tre chews. The wriggler hums in imitation.

Zahhak brings a small windup toy that tumbles about erratically. It’s sewn into a fuzzy tough hide that protects the wriggler from any sharp edges. It is not, however, protected from the wriggler’s sharp edges. You rescue it when it seems to be one gnaw from expiration.

Sethin makes an appearance as the wriggler finally forgets about Zahhak’s toy. A cascade of gold spots trickle down the wall and sweep around the room just ahead of the wriggler’s chase. They do three circuits of the room, including a daring charge through Tarren’s skirts. The cullbait makes it halfway up a bookcase before you managed to catch up as gre launches gremself back at you. You think your circulatory system freezes for a moment.

A moment later you’re holding a wide-eyed wriggler, but you’re also pretty sure that the light floated grem a bit on grir descent so maybe you’ll ask Jesara later instead of hyperventilating at Tarren now.

Back on the floor again, Jesara’s purrbeast prowls through with a live skittervermin. It lames the pest and lets it loose. The skittervermin scuttles past your lap on four and a half legs and the wriggler pounces, misses, pounces again and pins it. A quick flash of your hand dispatches the vermin before it can bite. You praise the wriggler’s hunting finesse and wash grir tiny talons before they make their way to grir mouth. Schooling done, the purrbeast returns to its rounds.

Nakerm and Sarita stop in and drop off a bowl of fruit and download a wriggler education app respectively. Her lusus perches on a chair back and hums and chirrs and bobs her head at the wriggler, but stays out of grasping range. She also finishes off the skittervermin’s carcass, solving that quandary.

The custodian, a burly scarred old Rust that you’re convinced will keel over any minute, (his horns are gray, you didn’t know that was _possible_ ), drops off a board and a cup of water and leaves without a word. You still don’t know the guy’s name or what the deal with the board is. The wriggler splashes the water and you’re both soon occupied drawing patterns on the light gray surface. The water leaves a dark trail that lightens and disappears as it evaporates. It’s strangely compelling and impressively efficient at holding the wriggler’s attention.

Sethin reappears for a few minutes at a time, laying out shapes and patterns on the board that the wriggler happily traces, silhouettes of moobeasts, buzzbugs, puntingbirds. You’re pretty sure that “APCLULPL is a humorless stick in the mud up his own rear” is not standard Consortium-approved schoolfeeding. Considering how much Sethin knows about, well, everything, you’re probably better off not knowing, and you don’t plan to repeat it, whatever it is.

There’s a matched set of ceruleans of Serket’s class. You’ve never seen them before. Arms interlocked, their horns sweep toward each other, individually asymmetrical, but they mirror one another as they speak with Tarren, so that Lirren and Nirrel Paxinn of budgeting and tithes (and seizures) look like one odd troll instead of two. You are no longer surprised when they drop off a squishy puzzle. The wriggler immediately tries to gnaw on it. It dents and bounces back, impervious. You’re impressed, the cullbait’s got a mouthful of weaponry. The Paxinns swish their way back out to continue their reign of papered and red-taped terror.

There’s five more Yellows, two Greens, a Brown, and a Rust, all staff members of the tributary libraries in cities across the continent, all bringing news, gossip, complaints, and tiny bundles of wrapped sweets. Tarren deftly intercepts these last and deposits them in a tall glass jar on the table.

You freeze as a stern Teal in a legislacerater uniform prowls in. Tarren introduces you to Arekit Prenet, Chief Liabilarannist of the University Law & Punishment Library. Liabilarannist Prenet solemnly meets the wriggler’s ever hopeful gaze and slips grem a copy of _Pride and Responsibility, a Jadeblood’s Burden Quarterly_ from the table. The wriggler happily mauls it. There’s a flurry of paper scraps and the cracked spine gets enthusiastically moistened in the wriggler’s tiny active maw.

Prenet cracks a smile like a crevice in the earth resulting from a quake and enquires about the wriggler’s millstones without looking at Tarren. You don’t exhale until he makes a smart about-face and the door clacks shut behind him. Tarren sighs and shifts a few things about on the table, pulling out a few extra copies of other likely targets and depositing them in the unlabeled burnables bin. You realize that tre is not in the least surprised. The wriggler chases a few of the paper scraps still moving in the air current from the door.

A Jadeblood floats in from the Reproductive Research and Development Office. You freeze again. It’s Porrim’s vocational sponsor from her brief stint at the RRDO, Magula Harrte. You only know her because she swanned in one night when you were crashed at Porrim’s and basically heaved a giant guilt trip at Porrim about leaving the RRDO for art. It was exceedingly awkward but it was too close to dawn to flee. You had pulled the covers over your head on the couch and pretended to be a very shy piece of performance art. Magula doesn’t look at you. She asks Tarren if she has any extra copies of PRJBQ, she wants to assign the interns some culturally relevant news reading.

“Alas,” Tarren states, “it was unexpectedly popular.” Tre doesn’t glance at the paper scraps or the bin.

Harrte’s hand flashes out and seizes the wriggler by grir chin. The wriggler shakes grir head and whines. She lets go.

“It’s small for its age,” she states. “Does it talk yet?”

“Gre’s within acceptable ranges for grir age,” Tarren replies, equally sure.

“And yes,” tre says pointedly, “But only when gre has something to say and someone gre knows will listen.”

“Hmph.” Harrte takes herself elsewhere.

The wriggler hums a bit and you realize that it’s the exact rise and fall of the previous conversation, complete with the nasal hmph at the end. You laugh in relief that the last two visitors are gone and hum a lullaby you’re pretty sure you learned from your lusus. The wriggler hums back, perfectly in tune. You try it with words next and gre can’t quite articulate them all, but gre’s pitch perfect. Something in your chest seems to flutter. You feel an unfathomable sense of absolutely unwarranted hope.

Jesara stops by at the end of the night shift, just before her dayshift, with a freshly laundered patchwork quilt, still warm from the tumblebugs in the basement. She pays you no mind as she inquires after Tarren’s health and the wriggler’s latest achievements. According to her cycle, she’s only a few weeks shy of laying, but her large frame carries the fragile extra weight without apparent effort, though you notice she is careful not to bend when she drops the quilt on your head like you’re the central pole of a circus revival tent and strides off, heavy heeled boots clicking primly. The quilt smells like toasted seaweed crisps and beach lavender. The wriggler is laughing again. You’re pretty sure Tarren and Jesara are too.

You wrap the quilt around the two of you and run the pads of your fingers over Jesara’s precise, sometimes elaborate stitches. Something rustles. Your tent is equipped with a pocket. The pocket is equipped with toasted seaweed crisps. All is forgiven.

You open the pack and parcel out a piece to the wriggler and one to yourself. The crisps are delicious, but there’s something about their smell that makes you suddenly feel three sweeps old.

Your eyes feel a little wet and there’s a nasty reverberation to your breathing. You feel like you’ve cracked some type of code.

You wonder where Jesara’s grubs are, how many she’s had, if maybe this is one of them, or could have been one of them, if it matters. You wonder if any of your grubs will be Violet. You’re not sure if you’re praying that they won’t, or that they’ll be as lucky when they’re culled, or if you’re jealous that you weren’t. You feel safe and you feel broken. You concentrate on your breathing and doling out crisps one at a time.

When the bag is empty, the wriggler wiggles in your lap, and turns enough to flicks tiny ear fins at you in a fuzzy “Okay? Okay? Wrong/Bad?”.

“All Okay”, you flick back.

“All Okay!” Gre flicks back, triumphant, motion crisp, and you both smile at one another.


	10. Chapter 10

 “Jesara?”

“Yes, Cronus?” She looks up from the university newsletter she’s perusing with a red pen and raised brow.

You don’t continue.

It’s the ninth perigee of your gestation, with likely three more to go. You feel unwieldy but know that the worse is yet to come. The warmerbloods’ gestations run more quickly and Mituna is hilariously bulbous and perennially astonished at it, perhaps a perigee or less from his laying date.

Jesara’s laid her clutch over a perigee past, with her usual aplomb even under the contractions that visible shook her. Kankri and his supeviscerater, the Dolorosa, every bit as terrifying as the legends that preceded her, assisted in a pool in a cave several layers of basement below where you sit now. They graciously allowed you to help, though mostly, you know, it was to help you understand your own development.

The laying lasted just a few hours, a consequence of prior clutches and her larger size, and she warned you that yours would likely last much longer. The eggs were leathery, a soft pale gray, speckled in her color, innocent of any indication of the blood color of their contents. Under the smell of blood, pooled water, and other fluids, there was a smell that was not quite wriggler. Jesara held each one, her face unusually solemn and devoid of her usual gentle humor, face jarringly naked. The Dolorosa clenched a hand on Jesara’s shoulder, as Kankri packed each one away to be carried to wherever they went next.

Kankri carefully handed you a carrier, cradled the other with equal care, and gestured you out with a head tilt. You glanced back. Jesara was still staring straight ahead, the Dolorosa’s hand still clenched on her shoulder. They were not looking at one another. You realized you’ve never seen Jesara leave the library, just as you’ve never before seen her without her paint.

Neither of you have spoken of the laying since.

*

You ask Sethin if he knew what happens to the wrigglers. You trust him not to tell you if you shouldn’t know. The golden mass of him quirks a brow not unlike Jesara, perhaps a bit offended that you could imagine any universe in which he is not the ultimate authority on any form of transcribed or recorded data in the network, and your palmtop scrolls a stream of ID numbers displayed as links.

There are several dozen, all ranked in chronological order by clutch, newest at the top. The dates at the bottom go back to the beginning of the Benevolent Era. The newest clutches account for most of the wrigglers and are groups of four to seven, mostly Greens through Blues, two Indigos. But back toward the beginning, the clutches are only one, a set of two: a Yellow, a Green and a Yellow, an Indigo, a Teal, and a Yellow again. There’s a space of a dozen sweeps between the last Yellow and the larger clutches.

Sethin’s swarm of light is bouncing. He usually doesn’t stay very long in one place but you get a sense of smugness and the shifting pool of light rapidly changes shapes and shivers like it might fly off in multiple directions if you don’t hurry up and figure out the punchline.

The oldest ID file on your screen flashes and clicks itself and you’re looking at his genderbent, more corporal mirror, Jethin Torrin, thin and wiry with muscle, 55 sweeps, yellowblood, voluntary helmsman and second in command of the _BR Impossible Truth_ , highly ranked for both mission success and crew longevity. Her reserved smile is Jesara’s but something in her eyes is completely Sethin’s sense of humor. You wouldn’t want to meet her in a back alley if she was mad at you.

Sethin’s light is bouncing in a sort of grandiose self-satisfied delight, like he’s not only showing off his very successful wrigglers, but also determined _the very best organizational format_ to do so. This is clearly what happens when you make a librainiac the cataloggerist.

After Jethin are another five links for Torrins: Saraas, Esthas, Darosa, Ineera, and Adorat.

Saraas and Esthas are the double clutch, 50 sweeps, the former a curvy Green curve-horned minor psionic and helmsman technician, the latter another wiry stiletto-horned helmsman, third-gendered.

Esthas is the primary helmsman of the _BR Judicious Cut_ , which ranks dual helmsmen due to the nature of its urgent, and usually classified, business.

Saraas is listed as female, served on the twice renamed flagship and retired 5 sweeps past to early wrigglerhood education in an on planet crèche. There’s another link to a Valier Torrin, 4 sweeps, a yellow with red and blue eyes and horns like Mituna’s, psi rating off the standardized charts. There’s a string of pictures that flash past that are clearly not part of the regular database. Valier looks happy. Saraas is by turns visibly happy and serene. You recognize them as regulars in the wriggler-proofed section of the stacks, an alcove sheltered against the wall closest to Sethin’s central hive processor rooms, where the bee hum manages to soothe asleep four out of five fussy wrigglers and five out of five grubs. Considering some of the things you’ve witnessed in this section and in the wider stage of pubic transportation, this is easily the most efficient use of lifecode finessing in the Rationality.

Darosa Torrin, 47 sweeps, unpainted, is the only Indigo, a darker mirror to his officially registered moirail, Esthas Torrin, shipmate and older sibling. He has the stiletto horns you’re coming to think of as Torrin type, and a thin wiry body more expected in his moirail’s caste. It’s an impressive testament to his skill as a mediculler that he serves the _BR Judicious Cut_ despite his blood.

Ineera Torrin, 43 sweeps, teal, has the Torrin horns and is an evidence technician at the university morgue with three legally registered kills during duels and eight fatal apprehensions. This is impressive considering that evidence technician is not, conventionally speaking, a public-facing job. You recognize her as another regular, sometimes in the wriggler section with Saraas and Valier. You’ve passed her a few times in the catacombs leading to or from Jesara’s suite, and you fervently hope she never has reason to take a dislike to you.

Adorat Torrin, 35 sweeps, the last Yellow, has his carrier’s enormous twisting horns and his donor’s tiny build. His smile is open and utterly his own. You imagine he breaks a lot of collapsing and expanding vascular pumps. His job title is listed only as The Evaluator. It doesn’t say what he evaluates. You’re contemplating what it might mean when Sethin gets frustrated with your lack of reaction. Your palmtop chimes.

ST: CA.

ST: CA. “What?”

ST: Nice Rack, Eh?

“What? No! Buzz off!”

ST: Ehhehehehe.

Still smug, the puddle of light zooms up and over your head, your horns feel oddly warm for a moment, and he’s gone to wherever he goes when he’s not answering queries or harassing innocent passersby.

You realize that he didn’t stay to show you the ones hatched after his death. You flip through and they are a stream of unrelated names, some assigned to families, some to cullers, some to elite crèches and others to state culleria. Some are old enough to be donors to your genetic code. Some are still wrigglers.


	11. Chapter 11

 “Jesara?”

“Yes, Cronus?” She looks up from another university newsletter she’s perusing with a red pen and raised brow.

“Kankri told me that he’s off spectrum and on Consortium-mandated hormone blockers.”

“Did he?” She puts the newsletter down.

“He said the Jades are still debating whether his mutation is beneficial or deleterious and they don’t want him to chance contributing to the slurry until they decide.”

“Yes, that is about the sum of it.”

“He’s a warmblood of some sort. What happens if they just don’t decide?”

“I think you can imagine.”

You hug your knees to your chest, though you can’t get them very close.

“He’s so freaking tiny, Jesara. I mean, he’s perfect like he is, I don’t want to change him, but it’s not fair to keep him from his final molt. It’s not fair to tell him to earn his way as an adult, but he can’t ever _be_ an adult, or at least that he might live his whole life waiting to find out if he’s considered viable. Considered valuable. And it’s not like he’d go leaking slurry every which way. Can you imagine him being less than fastidious about contributing or not?”

“What a vivid image.” One painted brow is raised comically high.

“Stop, you know what I mean. It’s not fair.”

“No. It’s not. But the Jade and Teal Consortium is hardly concerned with fair as it affects individuals. The needs of the many supersede the needs of a few. It is logical. It could be _worse_. In another era of history he might have been killed, or kept as a pet, or trotted out as symbol. At least now he has a chance to make meaningful personal connections according to his own merits and interests.”

“But it just doesn’t make sense!”

“Hmm?”

“The drones could easily detect anomalous slurry. And he wouldn’t go reproducing with a brooder when he knows that it would affect his case for applying for the block to be removed and that the grubs would have the same problems. So what are they afraid of?”

“Tell me what you know about the Signless.” She settles herself back in her chair. Her horns hook over the top into two slightly worn sections of the upholstery. This is the closest she gets to a casual posture. She folds her hands into her considering pose, and gives you her full attention.

“Wait, what? You mean the Sufferists?”

“No, not the cult in its current or prior incarnations, but the historical figure it’s based upon. Not the Sufferer, He-Who-Hears-With-Sympathy-And Raises-His-Hands-In-Comfort”, her voice takes on a liturgical lilt, “but the Signless, the redblooded troll at the base of it all.” You wonder if the title means that she’s a follower, or just that, like everything else, she’s collected the knowledge like jewels to be hoarded and brought out only to people who can admire them properly. You know by now that she honors you with her trust when she considers you among those who can appreciate such gems.

“How is this related?”

“Humor me.”

“You know how terrifying that sounds coming from an Indigo?”

“How very classist of you, Mr. Ampora.” You know she’s not really mad, but she’s right, that was out of line. You can’t get an apology past the lump of guilt in your throat, but you bow your fins back and hope it somehow conveys.

“Very well. This is related but it may take a while. I’m a historian, there will always be footnotes!” (This is said in the tone of, “There will always be Cavalreapers!” by Colonel Hoarfang before the last charge of Connera in the filmed-for-husktop historicry series that aired last perigee. You had watched it with Mituna, Xerrem, and Beneah. Mituna had kept a running list of inaccuracies in 40 point type on the wall screen. You don’t even think he _cares_ about history, you just think he’s bored and wanted to argue.)

She pauses until you look at her again. “Now what do you know about the Signless?”

“Not much. The Stone. The rooms under the Bridge of Flowers. That he stirred up the old empire and got publically culled for rabblerousing the warmbloods. The Summoner managed more of the same but more successfully. What else is there to it?”

“A great deal actually.”

“Wait, you said redblooded, right? Not rust? I thought that was just a metaphor, part of the joining the spectrum into a circle thing on all the brochures and free datagrubs.”

“It is a rather apt metaphor. It is also one of the still generally known parts that are based on fact. This is, you understand, not my area of study, but a librarian gets rather proprietary over the facts, especially the ones that seem to be endangered by more politically expedient versions.”

“Is this dangerous to hear?”

“Mr. Ampora, ignorance protects no one that dwells within it.”

You know she’s a bit exasperated with you as you’re still Mr. Ampora. She continues.

“You and I know that the colder end of the spectrum can be isolated at times. The midbloods and middle classes have the advantage of social stature and monetary security to socialize as they wish, the warmer bloods are encouraged into age groups and financially efficient housing regardless of their personal preferences, but the colder bloods are believed to need a bit more room to avoid triggering our, hmm, _‘unfortunate predilection to violence’_.” You can hear the quotations in her wry relation and you feel better for not being the only one who thinks it stupid. You feel better with the reassurance that maybe you’re not hosting a monstrous urge to destroy, unknown to you and lying under your awkward discomfort with yourself and hope that people will just overlook you instead of criticizing directly.

“In addition, barring unforeseen circumstances, you will likely outlive many of your age group peers just as I have.” You think of Sethin and that of all the wrigglers they raised, only one, maybe two might outlive her unless she dies young.

“Solitude may be needed at times but involuntary isolation is very lonely. There may be times when your only company is your own mind. Stocking up on things to ponder during such times, finding a purpose to one’s continued existence, however outwardly odd or obsessive, is only gathering reserves in the larder against the cold season. You are quite young now and will likely spend a great deal of time determining how you fit, in your own mind, in the company of individual other trolls, and in our society in general. In pursuit of this, it will be advantageous to understand how we as a culture and people arrived at the current state of our society. It will help you divide _instinct_ from _inculcation_.

“That said, nothing I tell you will be dangerous to know, considering that as a Violet you are quite immune to telepathy without deliberate acquiescence. However, that is not to say that discussing or acting upon such information would not bring consequences down upon our heads.”

“So it is dangerous. To you and to me.”

“ _Mr. Ampora_. I am not counseling _subversion_. I am counseling something far more difficult - to _know_ _yourself_.

“If I may further digress?”

You nod.

“During the Old Empire I was considered rather dry and boring for collecting scrolls, books, datagrubs, datacrystals, datapaks, and cultural artifacts of both troll and alien origin that could not be considered _trophies_ , and for not wishing to cull anyone over _expedience_ , or, _horrors_ , **_boredom_**. That’s the old definition of culling, of course, not the new version.”

“They sound like the boring ones. Books are kind of awesome!” You swirl and pin your earfins, hoping to convey excitement, utter honesty. You might be playing it up, but you’re not actually lying. You’ve been able to read for sweeps, that far is mandated for public schoolfeeding, but before you met Jesara, you didn’t actually read much more than the free periodicals on the public transit or the corners, and they’re all more ads than anything. Before the state supplied you a new palmtop with your duties, your old palmtop was too slow and the screen too small to do much of anything beyond keep time and receive mandatory announcements. Without a roommate, you had been unable to afford much outside of your apartment and food, but who’d want to room with a Violet? No one, at least no one you’d been comfortable knowing might be awake while you were asleep. You still can’t believe how many things you can borrow for _free_ from the library.

“Yes, Cronus, thank you for your vote of confidence.”

You know it’s dryly sarcastic, but she’s using your first name, so you think you’ve been forgiven.

“During the Revolution, many warmbloods considered me dangerous due to my hue, but the lesser of many evils and I was allowed my domain of the library and archives, as I rarely left and there were, at the time, several psionically gifted Yellows and Greens in the organizational and management positions as well as a rather persuasive Burgundy in acquisitions. A few sorts clamored to burn old books but the revolutionists ultimately had more pressing concerns when faced with so many upset libritarians and librainiacs.

“Since that time, many of my fellow bookishly-inclined coworkers have passed through age or illness or accident, and I have ascended, by default of longevity and not necessarily merit, to the head of the Central Library system. The Reformation of Benevolent Rationality classified me a steady cog in their machine, if a regrettably indigo one. The Rationalists are rather fond of the library’s usefulness, even if they have the occasional urge to ridiculously redact, and they do their best to ignore that throughout its history it has been maintained by a particular type of troll, and that that type is not related to _hue_ but to rather obsessive conservation of the past in service to the present and future, regardless of the current government, or truly, almost any event outside the library doors, until it comes through those doors in some form of recorded format.

“That said, I am the same person I have always been. The books and datagrubs are also individually unchanged, although the overall mass is much multiplied. The perceptions of all of these things – trolls and books - change wildly according to what our society determines to be valuable, but that does not change the object. Do you understand?”

“Yeah. I think I do. Thanks.”

“You are welcome.

“Now, there is historical precedent for a redblooded adult who, by the very virtue of his existence as a Red, combined with his insistence on one subversive yet compelling idea, incited a religion and later revolution so powerful that it toppled Her Imperious Condensation from her star-crowned throne, and His Mirthfulness from his skull-bestrewn altar. **_Trolls should treat other trolls as they themselves would wish to be treated_.** ”

You are both silent for a moment. The room is still echoing with the Signless’s pronouncement, like something bigger spoke through Jesara at that moment.

“Jesara? Are you a… follower?” You’re not sure if that’s the right word.

“Oh, wriggler-mine,” and her voice is soft and kind and full of gentle regret. You are reminded that she’s outlived many of the people she’s loved and respected and that she will likely continue to do so, and yet she still keeps reaching out. She was kind, even when you were a stranger. “How wrong have things gone that that should be a revolutionary idea?”

Your head spins and your clutch the chair and she lets you sit in silence until your fingers can relax.

You feel like your brain is a fish patty in a pan that keeps getting flipped. It was one thing to discuss something hypothetically, but something about how she said it makes it inescapable. Oh gods.

It’s _not_ wrong to not want to hurt anyone. It’s _not_ wrong to not want to be hurt.

The thought isn’t a revelation, but the certainty is.

For the first time, you understand how the librarians feel when people revise history. It’s not a revelation to realize that how you feel about yourself affects what you do. It _is_ a revelation to realize that what the state tells you that you ought to feel, the things you have been schoolfed and handheld and forcefed throughout your life, these were not the sum of the things you could become, but only what the state felt you ought to be. What you deserved to be. What was easiest. Oh gods and forbearers. How much of you is _you_?

Jesara waits again until you can focus on her again, until you pull your claws from the divots in the chair arms and wrap your arms around yourself. She leans forward and pulls a quilt off the couch and plops it in your lap, waits until you wrap yourself up.

“Cronus, the Signless is the _only_ Red, adult or wriggler or grub, listed in any of the 413 million writings and artifacts of the Central Library. _The only one_. **_Singular_**. Until the hatch records for your sweep, and for one Kankri Maryam, clearly the scion of the Signless, though by unknown means.”

Your hands feel very cold. You’re shivering. The only thing you can think of is that you’ve never seen Kankri take off more than his shoes, that you have no idea what the hormone-blockers look like, where they are, if they hurt. You think of how horrible it was to lie strapped to the clinic table and yet you knew that you would get back up, that it was something you had chosen to do, however terrified you were.

Jesara pauses and continues, softer.

“What makes you think that that one idea is any less powerful now? Or that the symbol of that idea has lost any potency?

“ _Equality. Kindness_.”

The two words are soft and feel like bandages pulling your mind and composure back together.

Her voice continues in her usual Companionable Lecture tone.

“It is unknown if the Signless had any psychic gifts or if he was only a very gifted speaker and prudent listener. However. The Jades and Teals have founded their rational society. You know well that it is difficult for some individuals to find work or respect, and the safety net meals taste like processed cellulose and glue. But it is exceedingly rare for anyone to be killed for failing to meet some standard of physical or mental capacity. Slurry donation is mandatory but there are waivers. There is a draft for Browns through Blues, but there are vocational waivers. Helmsmen must volunteer for their positions and are no longer equipment but citizens. They may retire to something other than death. There is _healthcare_. It is not perfect, but it has been worse. It could become so much worse.

“Kankri would not thank you for kicking up a fuss on his behalf. And it would not benefit him.

“You cannot protect him from everything. You can only accept him for who he is, as he is.

“However. However, I think that you understand how truly powerful a gift and strength the latter is.”

You nod. You have a lot to think about. You didn’t realize he was already your age. He’s a warmblood (probably) and he’s got his adult responsibilities sorted better than you, but he looks so much younger than you. Smaller than you at seven sweeps. Tick Tock. You wonder if you can look at him without the dual urges to hug him and hide him. It was one thing when he was the one protecting you. You could shake off your pale crush when you knew that he did what he did for those who needed it. Knowing his own vulnerability makes your attempt to contain your pale feelings entirely laughable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This concludes Cronus's arc, for now. Next up in this verse are Kankri and Meenah, so stay tuned if you want a glimpse of what it's like working at the Practical Applications Practice Department.


End file.
